Edna Adan Ismail

Somaliland nurse midwife, politician, diplomat and activist, who was the first female Foreign Minister of Somaliland from 2003 to 2006. She previously served as Somalia’s Minister of Family Welfare and Social Development.

She is the director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa and an activist and pioneer in the struggle for the abolition of female genital mutilation (FGM). She is also President of the Organization for Victims of Torture. In March 2022, she became the president of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.

She was married three times, including to Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, who was the prime minister of the State of Somaliland five days prior to Trust Territory of Somalia's independence and later the Somali Republic (1960–1960) and (1967–1969) and President of Somaliland (1993–2002), although the two divorced after five years.

Ismail was born in Hargeisa, in what was at the time British Somaliland, the daughter of a prominent Somali medical doctor. She was one of five children born to her mother, but two died at the time of delivery. At the time girls weren't educated in Somaliland, but her father hired a tutor for some local boys and she learned to read and write with them. She later went to a school in Djibouti where her aunt was a teacher. When she was eight years old, she underwent FGM. It was arranged by her mother and grandmother when her father was on a business trip; when he returned he was furious.

Wanting to prevent other women from undergoing the same trauma she did, she trained as a nurse and midwife in the United Kingdom at the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University. She later married Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, a Somali politician who was elected Prime Minister of Somalia in 1967, although the two divorced after five years.

She is said to be "the first Somali girl" to study in Britain, Somalia’s first qualified nurse-midwife and the first Somali woman to drive.