The impact of the Syrian Crisis on Lebanon has reached an unprecedented scale in the history of complex, displacement-driven emergencies. In April 2012, 32,800 Syrian refugees were registered or awaiting registration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Lebanon. By October 2018, the Government of Lebanon estimated that the country was hosting an estimated 1.5 million refugees, a quarter of the total Lebanese population.
The refugee crisis places tremendous pressure on Lebanon's services and resources, particularly at the decentralized level. Municipalities face challenges in providing adequate housing, ensuring quality public services, and creating jobs for both host communities and displaced/refugee populations. Furthermore, localities with the highest concentration of displaced people from Syria, including all large cities of Lebanon and their suburbs, consistently suffer from heightened insecurity, higher levels of tensions and more exposure to violence than other areas in Lebanon.
The above situation is further exacerbated by the current economic, political and health crisis. Lebanon is facing one of the gravest economic downturns since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s. The World Bank estimates that in 2020 real GDP contracted by 20.3 percent, on the back of a 6.7 percent contraction in 2019. In fact, Lebanon’s GDP plummeted from close to US$55 billion in 2018 to an estimated US$33 billion in 2020, while GDP per capita fell by around 40 percent in dollar terms. Public debt stands at 174 percent of the gross domestic product. The latest rapid unemployment assessment by ILO found that unemployment stood at 37 percent in 2020. According to UNESCWA, in 2020 more than half of the Lebanese people lived in poverty (55.3 percent), up from 27.4 percent in 2011-2012. Amid economic uncertainty and an extremely protracted crisis, challenges continue to deepen for many displaced refugees and Lebanese who face long-term poverty. Both Lebanese and refugees perceive that long-standing inequalities are deepening and competition for shrinking job opportunities and dwindling resources and services remain drivers of tension at the local level.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic, and on March 15, the government of Lebanon issued the governmental resolution on the General Mobilization. The first case of COVID-19 in Lebanon was confirmed on February 21 2020. As of July 5 2021, in Lebanon, the total number of cases rose to 545,671 cumulative cases of Covid-19, and 7,863 deaths have been reported. This complex situation puts additional pressure on the subnational authorities to deliver the quality of services and to create income generation opportunities for their communities.
The ‘Municipal Empowerment and Resilience Project’ (MERP) is a joint initiative by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat). The Project is implemented in partnership with the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities (MoIM) and is funded by the European Union (EU) through EU Regional Trust Fund in Response to the Syrian Crisis, the ‘Madad Fund’.
The Project aims to strengthen the long-term resilience of subnational authorities in Lebanon as well as host communities, refugees and displaced persons affected by the Syrian Crisis. To achieve this, the Project engages in a three-pronged approach: MERP aims to 1. strengthen processes, procedures and practices to enable municipalities and Union of Municipalities (UoMs) to deliver effective and efficient services in a transparent and accountable manner; 2. empower municipalities and UoMs to facilitate local economic development (LED) and to deliver basic services that address the needs of both host and refugee populations, and; 3. support communities to engage in municipal processes and procedures to ensure that municipalities UoMs are responsive to their needs. These objectives include efforts to support the government of Lebanon at national level to strengthen the enabling environment for local governments i.e., municipalities and UoMs, and to better respond to the needs of communities.
