Somalia marked the relaunch of IATA’s Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) in Mogadishu on 18 October, following a pilot that began in April with four travel agents and several airlines, including Ethiopian Airlines. The event also celebrated 35 years of cooperation between the Somali Civil Aviation Authority and IATA. IATA said at the pilot stage that the plan would open to all airlines and more than 300 travel agents operating in Somalia.
The pilot was announced on 30 April at IATA’s Focus Africa conference in Addis Ababa, with a full launch scheduled for the end of May. The October ceremony therefore marks work that was already well under way, and the date of the first live settlement cycle is the figure the market actually needs.
The history is also less tidy than the coverage implies. Somalia’s transport minister, Mohamed Farah Nuh, said in December 2025 that the country had rejoined the BSP after 33 years and that IATA was preparing to restore its BSP country code. An EU asylum agency country report places a relaunch in Mogadishu as far back as February 2023. These accounts do not agree, and TDN has not been able to reconcile them.
Why it matters is scale and structure. The BSP processed more than 700 million transactions across over 180 countries in 2025, worth USD 242 billion, according to IATA. Somalia will be a rounding error in those totals. For a market that has been largely outside the system, though, the BSP changes who can sell tickets with confidence. Mogadishu is served by 13 international carriers, according to ch-aviation capacity data from late 2025, and until a settlement framework works, each of them has had to manage agent credit risk and the repatriation of sales proceeds on its own terms.
Two questions will decide whether this is a milestone or a headline. The first is the remittance route: whether airlines can reliably move Somali sales revenue out of the country, which is the barrier IATA’s Focus Africa initiative says it is trying to remove. The second is accreditation, since a BSP is only as useful as the number of agents that qualify and stay in good standing.
TDN’s view is that Somalia has done the visible part. A BSP launch proves the country can plug into the global rails; it does not prove those rails will carry money out. If funds repatriation holds through the first year of settlement cycles, the Horn of Africa has a credible new market for airline distribution. If it does not, this will join the long list of African launches that looked complete at the ribbon cutting.
