Steffen Hertog is Professor in Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He joined the Department of Government in 2010 as a lecturer. He was previously Kuwait Professor at Sciences Po Paris, lecturer in political economy at the University of Durham and post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University.

He holds an MA from the University of Bonn, an MSc from the School of Oriental and African Studies and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

Diaspora and communities finance a substantial share of public goods in fragile and conflict-affected states, yet the drivers of this giving (whether contributions respond to altruism, kinship ties or risk-mitigation signals) are rarely tested against one another.This paper analyses 163 crowdfunding campaigns hosted on Sokaab and BulshoKaab, two Somali digital platforms which pool diaspora donations with community contributions and external donor matching to finance public projects in areas recovered from Al-Shabaab control. Because Somalia combines exceptionally strong clan-based obligations with severe implementation risks, it constitutes a most-likely case for kinship explanations and a hard test for risk-based ones. Using computational text analysis and large language model extraction of campaign features, we examine which campaign narrative strategies are most associated with reaching fundraising targets. It is found that campaigns relying on needs-based appeals (altruism) alone are the least rewarding. Those invoking community obligations (kinship) perform better, but almost always in combination with financial-transparency language. The most attractive campaigns are those foregrounding how: (i) funds will be matched; (ii) projects have been identified and will be monitored by communities; and (iii) specific services will be delivered. These campaigns achieve success rates above 85 per cent, compared with 52.5 per cent for needs-only appeals. Results are robust across project types. Evidence suggests that even in fragile contexts where kinship obligations and social enforcement are strong, contributions to public goods are conditional on signals which reduce financial and implementation risks. Findings have implications for informal taxation, diaspora development finance and the design of co-funding programmes as official development assistance contracts.