After a year of living face to face with SARS-CoV-2, it is high time to recognize the relationship existentially and give credit where credit is due. The coronavirus is confronting our species with questions and challenges that we never have consciously dealt with. For starters, humankind has not really inquired in the past if a…
Lost in the fog
Lost in the fog Lebanese insurers seek to ward off economic pressures and evil opinion spells The best thing to say about the performance of insurance companies in the year to date is that they are slowly reappearing from what seemed an organizational stupor that during the past year enveloped the sector up to the…
Inflection anniversaries
One has to assume that there are many reasons why somewhat articulate people tend to intellectualize social and economic moments of despair or change. Distancing ourselves in various ways from the direct emotions of shocks and despair, some talk of inflection points, some of tipping or turning points, and some perhaps of nadirs. All these…
Financial family lifelines
Beirut-based financial company OMT is a family-owned and managed enterprise that has morphed from being simply a ubiquitous sight – the yellow and black logos of OMT agencies are scattered around Beirut, urban centers, and Lebanese villages in all of the country’s provinces – in an overbanked country to an existential supply channel of stable…
Re-globalization of macro-social responsibility
Due to a combination of emergency needs and years of efforts, Lebanon has at the beginning of the year signed off with the World Bank on a USD 246 million loan for implementation of an Emergency Crisis and Covid-19 Response Social Safety Net project, or Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) for short [Editor’s note: the…
Health care services intact but compromised
In Lebanon, as in virtually all other countries around the globe, health has in 2020 been catapulted to the top spot of social concern after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. To assess the correlation between the pandemic, national governance, the economic and liquidity crises, and the overall state of public health in Lebanon, Executive…
Organic care and true beauty niches
The global cosmetic and personal care market is growing, the upward swing especially boosting companies that produce organic and sustainable products. The specificity of new manufacturing trends and the evolution in marketing funnels, such as the rise of micro social media influencers, is shifting the research-intensive health-related sector towards viability of small enterprises, niche producers,…
Drug money
What a difference in perception a year makes – especially this year of 2020, and especially in all matters concerning health, directly or indirectly. Let’s assume – very reasonably – that you were cleaning your hands a few times a day at about this time in late 2019. Were you to have been engaging in…
Alternative medicine spikes
Alternative medicine has been sitting in the shadow of traditional, Western medicine for some time in Lebanon: alternative medicine. Though it is not controversial, alternative medicine is still seen as a complement to traditional medicine. Long a fixture of the Lebanese traditional scene, with stories, and for some, memories of elder Lebanese concocting herbal remedies…
Startups actually
Success is a perfect measure of life. Yet this perfect measure is never in itself perfect. Money, knowledge, passion, experience of gain, learning from failure… All can be successes and each can be a tremendous hurt that changes life’s trajectory. It depends on our objectives and circumstances. Success of entrepreneurial startups and young tech enterprises…