Edna Adan Ismail () (born 8 September 1937) is a nurse midwife, activist and was the first female Foreign Minister of Somaliland from 2003 to 2006. She previously served as Somaliland's Minister of Family Welfare and Social Development. She is the director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa and an activist and pioneer in the struggle for the abolition of female genital mutilation. She is also President of the Organization for Victims of Torture. She was married to Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal who was the prime minister of the State of Somaliland five days prior to Trust Territory of Somalia's independence and later the Somali Republic (1960-1960) and (1967–69) and President of Somaliland (1993–2002). Early life Ismail was born in Hargeisa, British Somaliland on 8 September 1937, the daughter of a prominent Somali medical doctor. She was one of five children born to her mother, but two died at the time of delivery. At the time girls weren't educated in Somaliland, but her father hired a tutor for some local boys and she learned to read and write with them. She later went to a school in Djibouti where her aunt was a teacher. When she was eight years old, she underwent FGM. It was arranged by her mother and grandmother when her father was on a business trip; when he returned he was furious. Wanting to prevent other women from undergoing the same trauma she did, she trained as a nurse and midwife in the United Kingdom at the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University. She later married Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, a Somali politician who was elected Prime Minister of Somalia in 1967. She is said to be "the first Somali girl" to study in Britain, Somaliland's first qualified nurse-midwife and the first Somali woman to drive. Hospital work In 1980, Ismail began building a hospital in Somaliland's capital of Hargeisa, but was forced to leave the country due to the beginning of the Somali Civil War in 1981. She returned to Somaliland and built from scratch a maternity hospital, which she continues to run. The Edna Adan Maternity Hospital officially opened on 9 March 2002, in land donated to her by the regional government at a site formerly used as a rubbish dump. The region lacked trained nurses to staff the hospital – as most had either fled the country or been