NAIROBI — Yosuke Nagai was 19 years old when he first turned his attention to Somalia, traveling into one of Africa's most protracted conflicts with the aim of helping young people find a path away from violence. He now leads Accept International, the only foreign-funded nongovernmental organization running a reintegration program for former members of al-Shabab inside the country.
Nagai, born in 1991, began in 2011 by building an educational program for Somali students, targeting what he saw as the underlying conditions that feed recruitment into al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked insurgent group that has waged war across Somalia for nearly two decades. The program was not deradicalization at first — it was a bet that tackling poverty and lack of opportunity would reduce the pool of fighters before they joined.
By 2013, Nagai had expanded that work into a rehabilitation program for Somali gang members, applying many of the same tools — counseling, vocational support, structured community reintegration — to a population caught between criminality and insurgency. The gang program served as the operational model that would later define Accept International's approach to former combatants.
Three years later, in 2016, the Somali federal government approached Nagai's organization to collaborate on a formal reintegration effort for fighters leaving al-Shabab. That partnership gave Accept International its current mandate: bringing ex-combatants out of the insurgency and back into civilian life, working alongside Somali authorities.
Al-Shabab has controlled significant territory across southern and central Somalia for years. Despite sustained pressure from African Union forces and the Somali National Army, the group continues to recruit, tax civilian populations and carry out attacks in Mogadishu and beyond. The challenge Nagai's program addresses is not simply ideological — former fighters face stigma, a lack of economic alternatives and, in some cases, active threats from al-Shabab against those who defect.
Accept International's model distinguishes it from most deradicalization efforts elsewhere in the world, which are typically run by governments or large multilateral bodies. Nagai's organization is an NGO, foreign-funded and Japanese-led, operating in an environment where security conditions have forced most international humanitarian organizations to scale back or withdraw entirely.
Nagai holds a visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford and sits on the Youth Advisory Board of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Those roles have given him platforms to argue for a shift in how the international community approaches violent extremism — away from purely military or punitive responses and toward longer-term social investment in the individuals who make up armed groups.
The question of what works in deradicalization remains contested. Critics argue that resources spent on former fighters come at the expense of victims and communities those fighters harmed, and that some participants cycle back into violence. Defenders of the approach, including Nagai, contend that without a functioning exit pathway, fighters have little incentive to defect, which prolongs conflicts and increases casualties on all sides.
Somalia's federal government has backed the collaborative framework with Accept International, but the country's security environment complicates every aspect of the work. Al-Shabab has explicitly targeted individuals it regards as collaborators with foreign organizations. Former members who enter reintegration programs take on real personal risk. The organization's continued operation depends on security arrangements that are not publicly detailed.
Nagai's trajectory — from a 19-year-old with no institutional backing to director of the only program of its kind in one of the world's most dangerous operating environments — took roughly 15 years to build. As of 2026, Accept International remains the sole foreign-funded body carrying out this function in Somalia.
