Masaf Spaces: Empowering Innovation, Transforming Lives in Africa
The founding story — Masaf as a movement, from the Degahbour Community Library to the first innovation hub in Jigjiga.
What began as a single community library in Degahbour has grown into a movement. Masaf Spaces was founded by Ahmed Taman Hasen with a conviction that young people in the Somali Region of Ethiopia deserve the same access to opportunity, skills, and networks as their peers anywhere in the world.
The Degahbour Community Library, established years before MASAF's formal founding, reached over 100,000 students with books, study space, and a quiet place to think. It proved that when you provide access, young people use it. That insight became the seed for something much larger.
In April 2024, Masaf Spaces opened its first innovation and co-working hub in Jigjiga, the capital of Ethiopia's Somali Region. The hub offered training programs, mentorship, startup support, and a physical community for youth, women, and underserved populations who had been systematically excluded from economic opportunity.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Within months, hundreds of young people had enrolled in skills courses, launched ventures through the incubation program, and found peer networks that replaced isolation with collective momentum. MASAF was no longer just a space — it had become a platform for transformation.