Wonder Woman of the Week: Dr. Hawa Abdi

Dr. Hawa Abdi stands as one of Somalia’s most quietly powerful figures—a physician, human rights advocate, and matriarch whose life’s work unfolded amid the country’s decades of conflict. Trained as a gynecologist in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, Abdi returned home to Mogadishu with a vision that blended medicine, education, and self-reliance. On family-owned farmland outside the capital, she established a small clinic intended to serve women who had little access to healthcare. What began as a modest medical outpost would, through necessity and resolve, grow into something far larger: a refuge shaped not by ideology or arms, but by compassion and persistence in a landscape fractured by war.