Innovation is useless if you don’t listen.
An international NGO set out to build community toilets in a Syrian refugee camp that I always visit in the Bekaa, Lebanon in order to promote better cleanliness and sanitation. The NGO worked for months and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions, to equip these camps with bathrooms for the entire community. When they were done, they inaugurated the project, invited people, and celebrated their success. A few days later, the refugees put down the communal toilets and sold the metal sheets for $20 each.
You might be asking why is that? Surely, everyone needs toilets.
But if someone had stopped and asked these refugees what they need, they would have realized that toilets are the first thing they set up in their informal habitats.
They would have quickly realized that communal toilets are such a weird thing culturally. They might work in India — I have even worked with NGOs in Mumbai who have successfully carried out such projects — but for Arabs, they are quite shameful.
They would have also realized that their money would have been better spent creating fire-proof ovens instead. Using burners out in the open has led to many a fire, and completely avoidable deaths, in these camps. Creating insulating structures for open flames would have been a much cheaper and much more impactful project.
But the problem is that no one asks people what they need. No one takes the time to understand the problem and the context they are working in to devise specifically tailored solutions.
If they did that, they would have realized a long time ago that the UNHCR tent, immediately and universally deployed to appease refugees, is so badly designed for different climates that it collapses under snow and becomes intolerable in the heat, prompting refugees to spend their own money and buy tarp for housing — all in order to fix a solution that was meant to help them.
And I have heard of countless other stories like that.
Farms Not Arms
That’s why with Farms Not Arms, we aimed to do things differently. Using design thinking and systems thinking, we are creating a model for regenerative refugee agriculture and building a project with Syrian refugees in Lebanon to promote food security, ecological restoration, and agricultural education.
The goal behind it is to help refugees feed themselves nutritious food while learning more sustainable and future-forward agricultural techniques. This way, as they plant healthy food to nourish themselves, they are restoring the land they are on and leaving it better than they found it — thinking about the future of the land even if they are temporary residents. In building it out, we would be creating a model to address the migration crisis while easing effects of climate change.
When I started heading this project, I was excited by the potential to create a new innovative model for food security, but with my human-centered design background in development/social impact, I knew that no matter what, our project had to, first and foremost, be rooted in what the refugees actually need on the ground.
Contextual Immersion
Being Lebanese and having set up other refugee projects, I already had some background on the refugee situation there, but to deepen it, I started doing immersive research in the Bekaa region: spending time in different camps, visiting multiple farms where refugees are working, understanding how they procure their foods, the reality of working in agriculture and so forth.
One thing that became immediately clear is the need to redesign refugees’ access to food. An alarming insight was how most food in Lebanon passes through refugees’ hands but they cannot afford to eat it, and when they do buy food, it is of the lowest quality and filled with hormones and chemicals. Also, most of the refugees working in agriculture are teenage girls who are paid $4/day.
Refugees Lead the Design Process
We wanted to remedy that while more formally incorporating refugee voices in the process. We set up a design sprint in the Bekaa and invited a group of Syrian refugees to actively participate in helping us better understand their agricultural experiences, food challenges and needs.
By placing them in the driver’s seat, we ensured that refugees’ voices led the co-creation process and that the problem areas they identified were our starting point in building a solution.
Bringing Experts In
Refugees’ needs and opinions are crucial, but neither them nor us have the subject matter expertise to properly design something that is effective, specific, and truly impactful.We consequently held an echoing “expert” sprint in NYC based on the refugee design sprint insights and invited some of the most innovative minds in modern agriculture, architecture, engineering, education, and more to work with us. During the day, they worked in groups, interviewed refugees in the Bekaa and asked them questions and then designed solutions based on the insights they received. The goal was to leverage their different areas of expertise, combine and adapt them to the refugee context to create a comprehensive pilot that produces the maximum impact.
This was also our starting point to building our network of multi-sector experts and more specifically curating a robust team for Farms Not Arms that includes Agritecture, one of the leading urban agriculture consultancies; architects from Bjarke Ingels Group; engineers from Aerofarms the largest vertical farm in the world; NYC Department of Education’s Garden Kitchen Lab program, an immersive gardening curriculum for underserved kids across NYC; as well as a multitude of urban farms from across NYC.
Project Definition
After also engaging local experts from the American University of Beirut and other Lebanese environmental architects/engineers and testing some of the design sprint ideas, we settled on a pilot project to cover our priority areas:
- access to nutritious food; because when they do have access to food, nutrition is forgotten
- regeneration; as Lebanon’s agricultural and food sectors have greatly deteriorated and soil is losing nutrients; and
- most importantly, education in everything we do, to teach future forward agricultural skill sets that are becoming more in demand everywhere.
Revisiting Our Goals
We were set on these 3 main priorities and my time in Lebanon this March was about solidifying partnerships and setting down the foundational work for our launch in the summer.
Being there, however, I realized that our design had overlooked one of our secondary goals — social cohesion. It did come up in the design sprints, and even though we aimed to target it by opening our trainings to local Lebanese host communities, we had underplayed its consequences.
Diving deeper into the local context and learning from previous projects made me realize that the central focus of what we are doing has to shift. If we don’t place social peace at the center and utilize agriculture innovations as a pathway to peace, there is a high chance we would actually be creating conflict by renting a land and planting food for refugees.
Understanding the Lebanese Ecosystem
To understand why social cohesion is so important, it’s good to look at the Lebanese context. At the onset of the Syrian refugee influx, Lebanon had an open border policy for 4 years, letting in any and all Syrians until they became more than 25% of the population. Official records counted 1.4 million refugees in a country whose population is less than 5 million, with actual numbers running higher. To put this in perspective, it is the equivalent of having all of Germany migrate to the US in less than 3 years — all during a government shutdown, and without accounting for the 500,000+ Palestinian refugees already in the country.
To make matters worse, with Lebanon not having a president and a functioning government for around 3 of those years, there was no strategy to deal with and manage the influx of Syrians. A lot of politicians, given their affiliation with Syria, were not convinced that they were refugees but merely “visitors” and refused to set up official camps even though UNHCR were urging them to do so.
The politicians’ reluctance turned Lebanon into the country with the highest percentage of refugees in the world and with no official camps to turn to, the Lebanese opened their doors to Syrians, housing them in every available corner: sometimes in their own homes, but in other times, in schools, hospitals, municipal facilities, empty lands, unfinished buildings, and so forth.
8 years have passed and what originally felt like a duty to take care of others started to take a huge toll on the local host communities. Having a 25% population increase without the right management was a real strain on natural resources, water, food, job opportunities, infrastructure that became really palpable on Lebanese community and led to a 66% increase in overall poverty since 2011.
Everywhere in the country felt the refugee crisis, but in the Bekaa it was most deeply experienced, with some estimates saying that it alone had 1 million refugees at a point in time. With the international aid community focused on Syrian refugees, the Lebanese felt left behind and forgotten, especially the more vulnerable of them who tend to be hosting the most refugees. This led to a lot of municipalities becoming harsher with refugees and a lot of tension between locals and refugees who were accused of taking jobs, resources, etc…
Decision to Pivot: Starting with Social Peace
Disregarding the local community and their struggles while not being cognizant of existing tensions could lead to different kinds of unintended conflict. For Farms Not Arms to truly embody its mission, we cannot help refugees in a vacuum. We have to create a holistic model that works with the local community, especially that we are working close to the Christian town of Zahle, Bekaa, an even tenser political climate given the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim refugee population.
With all this, I decided to pivot the project and include the host community all throughout. The focus of Farms Not Arms became to foster social peace through the lens of agriculture, launching an agriculture initiative to build farms together and not pull arms against each other. In doing so, we would be using agriculture as a means to heal divides, restore the land while increasing access to nutritious food.
We also clearly delineated our focus to youth who are more interested in technology and in learning new things, and on imparting skills that refugees can apply anywhere and building a structure that the host community can benefit from on the long run.
Why Human-Centered Systems Design Matters
In doing so, I became cognizant of the fact that we might have done a good job with design thinking and understanding the perspective of the refugee, but we fell short of incorporating the entire system.
This lesson is systems design reaffirmed my belief that creating good design, especially social design, means you are not afraid to go back to the drawing board however many times it takes: quickly throw something out and repeat, iterate, to ensure that it is user-centric and system-sensitive…and it all starts by actively and attentively listening to what everyone has to say.
If you don’t listen to what people need and what their situation is, innovation can be useless or even downright dangerous. Listening, extrapolating, and incorporating lessons might take longer, but eventually it will lead to real and durable impact. Which should always be the goal.
We might be working on developing the most innovative regenerative agriculture farm for refugees but if we don’t listen to their situation and if we don’t incorporate the wider systemic reality, we might create a disaster. What would we have done if when our structures are set up, they get stolen, the refugees get attacked, or both refugees and hosts start a fight? How horrendous would it be if we set up to create Farms Not Arms and end up with Arms Over Farms? By using human-centered systems design, we are consciously making sure this never happens.
