Building Succession Pipelines in Fast-Growing East African Institutions

By Idil Ibrahim Aden, Founder & Managing Director, Shaqo Kaab Solutions

Succession planning tends to get treated as a problem for large, mature organisations — something a multinational does for its C-suite, not something a growing bank, NGO or enterprise in Hargeisa or across the wider East African region needs to think about yet. In our experience, this is exactly backwards. Fast-growing institutions are the ones most exposed to the risk succession planning is designed to manage: the departure of one or two key people derailing operations, because the organisation grew faster than its bench strength did.

The specific risk in fast-growth environments

When an institution is expanding quickly — opening branches, taking on new mandates, scaling a workforce — critical knowledge tends to concentrate in a small number of people almost by accident. The person who set up a process becomes the only one who fully understands it. The manager who built a department’s client relationships becomes personally load-bearing for those relationships. This concentration isn’t a sign of poor management; it’s a natural consequence of growth outpacing formal knowledge transfer. The exposure only becomes visible when that person resigns, is promoted elsewhere, or is simply unavailable at a critical moment.

What succession planning actually requires

Succession planning is sometimes reduced to an org chart with names pencilled in next to boxes. That version rarely holds up under pressure, because it hasn’t addressed the underlying requirements:

• Role criticality mapping — identifying which positions carry disproportionate operational or institutional risk if vacated suddenly, which is not always the most senior roles.
• Capability assessment — an honest view of who is ready now, who is developable within one to two years, and where there is genuinely no internal candidate.
• Development pathways — structured exposure, mentoring and stretch assignments for identified successors, not just a label.
• Knowledge transfer mechanisms — documenting institutional knowledge that currently exists only in one person’s head, particularly for process-heavy or relationship-heavy roles.

Starting where you are, not where a template assumes you are

A common reason succession planning stalls in growing institutions is that it gets approached as a single, comprehensive project — map every role, assess every employee, build every pathway — before any of it has proven useful. A more realistic starting point is to identify the three to five roles whose sudden vacancy would most disrupt operations, and build succession depth for those first. This produces a usable outcome quickly and creates institutional buy-in for expanding the exercise.

Succession planning as institutional resilience, not just talent strategy

For banks and regulated institutions in particular, succession planning increasingly intersects with governance expectations — boards and regulators want assurance that institutional continuity doesn’t depend on any single individual. Framed this way, succession planning stops being an HR initiative sitting alongside the “real” business priorities and becomes part of how the institution demonstrates operational resilience — a case that tends to secure leadership attention far more reliably than framing it as a talent-development nicety.