Editorial

A scary, sticky, and deceiving mindset

by Yasser Akkaoui
written by Yasser Akkaoui

The Lebanese government is no longer presiding over a financial collapse; it is attempting to codify a permanent state of decline. The proposed “Gap Law”, short for Financial Gap Resolution Law, testifies to a governmental masterclass in legislative dissembling. By adopting a rhetoric of “protecting small depositors,” the political class is quietly insulating itself from accountability while stripping citizens of their wealth and their future.

For decades, the Lebanese economy siphoned private capital to finance an inept state that prioritized the enrichment of dishonest politicians over the building of a productive nation. Today, the government’s response to the wreckage is an “ad hoc” remedy that betrays a backward, defensive mindset and de-facto powers the survival of the corrupt at the expense of strategy.

We must look to the regional vanguard for achievable alternatives. In 2024, the UAE’s non-oil economy generated approximately $365 billion. For its population of roughly 10 million, this translates to a non-oil GDP per capita of $36,500. Applied to Lebanon’s population of nearly 5.8 million, this benchmark translates to a $211 billion economy.

Such transformation is achievable with $100 billion in investment over the next decade. These investments could even produce much larger fruits by being leveraged into Arab economic integration at the historic inflection point witnessed by the region’s development-minded countries. However, only a trustworthy sovereign state – one  that respects property rights – can domestically attract and regionally leverage such capital on the foundation of revitalizing state-owned enterprises, modernizing infrastructure, and funding reconstruction.

Instead, the country is being strangled by a proposed law that aims for nothing more than the managed evaporation of the people’s assets. This strategy is a blatant violation of Article 113 of the Code of Money and Credit, which explicitly mandates that the state is liable for the losses of the central bank. By attempting to legislatively disappear the burden of long-squandered billions, the government is executing a sovereign default against its own citizens. A political class that did not spare the lives of more than 100,000 citizens during Civil War years of militia rule will not blink before squandering their money. Accountability is a moral imperative.

The solution remains a matter of political will. By using Lebanon’s gold reserves as a strategic shield and its state-owned assets – from failed utilities to prime real estate – as an engine for growth, the government could recapitalize banking sector and begin making the people whole.

Starting with the Gap Law, the state must decide whether it serves the people and the law of the land or is simply the legal department for the warlords who broke the nation?

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Comment

The Digital Generation

by May El Hachem
written by May El Hachem

Step into almost any café or shared workspace in Beirut and a particular scene repeats itself: young professionals working for economies they may never see. Screens glow with design drafts, code repositories, and contract negotiations with clients in Berlin, Dubai, Toronto—anywhere but here. They are not chasing slogans about resilience; they are trying to stay one invoice ahead of a currency that erases value overnight. These are the Lebanese youth refusing to wait for a state that has abdicated its role in their future.

Lebanon’s youth unemployment rate (ages 15-24) surged from 23 percent in 2018 to 47.8 percent by 2022, according to estimates from the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Lebanon’s Central Administration of Statistics (CAS), a rate that nearly doubled in just four years. It is not a shortage of will that holds them back, but the absence of an economy capable of supporting them. A generation more globally connected than any before it has been reduced to refreshing buffering pages—an everyday reminder of a state that cannot deliver even the most basic infrastructure.

A demographic advantage turned economic strain

Sometimes described as Lebanon’s greatest asset, its youth have become the country’s unkept promise. According to the ILO’s 2024 report, youth aged 15-24 comprise one of Lebanon’s largest and most affected demographic cohorts. Every departure chips away at what remains of that promise. The airports are crowded with one-way ambition: engineers, designers, doctors, all in search of opportunities elsewhere.

But the costs cut deeper. Today Lebanon’s overall employment-to-population ratio has collapsed alongside youth unemployment and now sits at just 30.6 percent down from 43.3 percent only a few years prior according to a 2022 survey conducted by the ILO and CAS. Informality, meanwhile, has become the new rule: the share of informal workers grew from 55 percent in 2018 to more than 62 percent in 2022, according to The Policy Initiative’s 2024 report on Lebanon’s changing workforce.

When degrees don’t translate into jobs

On the surface, Lebanon boasts a stream of university graduates. Yet when these young people enter the job market, they find themselves adrift in a widening skills gap. According to a 2023 survey conducted by World Bank and Forward MENA, the educational arm of Beirut Digital District, on 82 digital and tech companies, 88 percent are actively recruiting full-time staff but cannot find the right talent, while 64 percent are specifically seeking software developers and falling short. The challenge isn’t limited to technical know-how: high demand also exists in digital marketing, UI/UX design—or the process of creating user-friendly and appealing

products—and social media skills, with employers now equally prioritizing ‘soft’ abilities such as teamwork, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

Worryingly, 76 percent of surveyed companies identify a persistent mismatch between what students learn and what jobs actually require. This disconnect means that businesses face extra costs re-training new hires to fill basic manpower needs, while fresh graduates often find themselves underprepared for the evolving demands of the market.

The roots of this problem run deep. As confirmed by a 2023 World Bank report and additional research by Al Safa News, over 31 percent of Lebanese companies are unable to find suitable talent at all, while three-quarters of employers believe the skills gap is growing. The collapse of thousands of businesses since 2019, combined with an accelerating exodus of young skilled workers, has further depleted local expertise, especially in high-demand sectors like tech, healthcare, and engineering.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s educational system still privileges rote academics over practical training. As a result, too many graduates leave university without the coding, critical thinking, or digital skills needed to thrive. Sector initiatives such as the World Bank and Forward MENA’s Skilling Up Lebanon program, which has delivered digital and gig economy training to thousands offer hope by directly linking youth to in-demand work and employer-valued certification. But without systemic reform, ambitious young people may remain locked out of the job market, or forced abroad to find roles that match their abilities.

Outdated laws in a freelance economy

Lebanon’s labor framework still belongs to a world before Wi-Fi: written for office hours, not remote contracts; for employers, not platforms. Yet today, thousands of young professionals work across borders, billing in dollars, earning in instability, living without protection.

A 2022 policy brief by The Policy Initiative titled “Lebanon’s ‘Missing Middle’: Online Delivery Workers Under Precarious Conditions,” finds that platform-based workers, from delivery drivers to freelancers, occupy a legal grey zone, excluded from both labor protections and social insurance. The report highlights how the country’s 1946 Labor Code makes no mention of independent or digital workers, forcing them into precarious “consultancy” contracts that deny them basic rights or benefits.

The ILO’s 2025 rapid assessment echoes this picture, warning that Lebanon’s private-sector labor market remains “severely disrupted,” with widespread business closures, income losses, and surging informality, particularly among youth. Together, these findings expose the legal vacuum expanding beneath the country’s most dynamic workforce; one that the state still pretends not to see.

Reform, meanwhile, drags on. Ministries overlap, committees meet, drafts circulate: and nothing changes. Another year of potential quietly dissolves into paperwork.

Education, law, and trust

If Lebanon truly wants to turn its youth bulge into an asset, reform must begin where hope hasn’t yet expired: in classrooms, in contracts, and in trust.

As per the report of the Ministry of Education and UNESCO, Lebanon recently launched the “Digital Transformation Strategy 2025: Reimagining Learning in Lebanon,” an ambitious initiative to infuse artificial intelligence (AI) and modern technology into learning and promote data-driven governance in schools. However, as noted by the Asfari Institute, a UK-based grant making charity, and World Bank, the public-school curriculum, still based on a 1997 framework, remains outdated and inadequate for 21st-century job markets.

Efforts by international agencies, including “Skilling Up Lebanon” by Forward MENA, the World Bank and UNICEF, seek to bridge the gap between academic learning and real digital skills. Nevertheless, challenges such as poor internet infrastructure, persistent digital divides, and insufficient teacher training continue to impede systemic change.

Beyond education reform, Lebanon has also taken long-overdue steps to update its labor market framework. As per a 2025 Asfari Institute policy note, Lebanon adopted landmark amendments to its Labor Law (Articles 1, 2, and 12) in May 2025, recognizing remote and part-time work by expanding the definition of “worker” and modernizing employment contracts to protect a broader range of flexible arrangements. The labor code now formally extends protection to freelance and platform-based work, with recent increases in social security coverage and an official minimum wage of LBP 18,000,000 per month (approximately $200 USD) as of August 2025.

Despite these encouraging legal updates, Lebanon’s reform landscape remains deeply uneven. Yet as per the assessment in the 3RF Reform and Recovery Framework, the deficit of true alignment persists: private sector dynamism is stymied by political instability and inadequate coordination among state, civil society, and business actors. Ongoing crises, from economic collapse to regional conflict, routinely derail even the best-designed reform programs and fuel a crisis of trust in public institutions.

Lebanon’s ability to sustain reform depends on continued international support from the likes of the World Bank, UNICEF, and UNESCO, who increasingly step in to fill funding and governance gaps, but meaningful progress ultimately hinges on the government’s capacity for implementation.

A question Lebanon can no longer postpone

Lebanon suffers from is not a deficit of youth or ambition, but a deficit of alignment. The private sector is ready, the talent is waiting, and the bridge between them is still missing.

Lebanon’s youth are already integrated into the global digital economy; they did not wait for domestic institutions to enable their participation. From cafés, co-working spaces, and family homes, they produce software, media, and services that circulate far beyond the country’s

borders, generating value in ecosystems that hardly acknowledge the states that failed to support them.

The issue is not simply one of departure or “brain drain,” but of structural compulsion. Their exit—physical or economic—was not a matter of preference but of necessity. Lebanon does not suffer from a shortage of skilled or ambitious people; it suffers from political and economic systems unable or unwilling to absorb their capabilities. The result is a persistent mismatch between human capital and national capacity, with long-term consequences for the country’s competitiveness, institutional legitimacy, and social cohesion.

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AnalysisBanking & Finance

Liability and legitimacy

by Executive Editors
written by Executive Editors

A government’s highest duty is the dignified sustenance of its polity. Governments empowered by their people are accountable to them, and the Lebanese state has a profound reckoning ahead. The reformist government—elected under the banner of rescuing a country gutted by external aggression and catastrophic internal mismanagement—has yet to take the first essential step toward restoration: acknowledging the scale of its responsibility. On the contrary, during a November 2025 conference, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told a crowd of over 700 participants that the money owed to depositors would not be repaid but written off.

Every delay in accepting liability for the losses imposed on depositors deepens not only material deprivation but also a crisis of democratic legitimacy. In the absence of a coherent resolution framework, Lebanon is drifting further into a fragmented, cash-based economy that echoes the dysfunction of state-owned sectors such as electricity and water: systems in which public failure creates private hardship while well-connected actors benefit from opacity and scarcity.

Just as state assets belong to the Lebanese people, so too do the state’s liabilities. And yet, decades of fiscal mismanagement, coupled with a refusal to assign responsibility within the establishment, have left the private sector—long the country’s sole engine of productive growth—exposed to paralysis and collapse. The choice now is simple: either Lebanon undertakes a credible restructuring process that protects households and restores confidence, or it continues along a path where economic life is conducted outside institutions altogether.

With both the stakes and the costs rising, Lebanon must approach its upcoming meetings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) not as an agent of international institutions and foreign powers, but as a governing body in need of its own vision that serves the national common good. The credibility of that vision will be measured by whether the state finally confronts the truth it has avoided.

The problem of the IMF

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), devised for a global trade system informed by the economic theories at time of its establishment, has changed in many respects over the past 80 years. But the fund and entire World Bank system of today is still not the entity that the Lebanese government is accountable to. 

The IMF has its governing principles and operational mandates, however controversial, including the mandate of lending money to member countries exclusively on grounds of feasible prospects for repayment of funds injected into an economy and a state’s emergency funding needs. It has its formulas and models for determining a state’s ability to service debts owed to the IMF.

These rules include disbursement ceilings when entering funding agreements and the requirement that the borrowing country’s debt to the IMF does not remain unpaid. A big part of the repayment capacity matrix is the imperative that debt to income ratios are within margins accepted by the IMF or that debts are reduced from excessive levels by any means necessary. IMF agreements are also conditional upon adherence to the fund’s demands, such as implementation of fiscal discipline or/and structural and administrative reforms. 

Unsustainable write-offs

As has been pointed out by Lebanese economists during IMF negotiations in 2021/22 and again this year, the fund’s presumed debt-to-income ratio of Lebanon, with public obligations estimated at 140 billion USD, acts as a wall prohibiting a feasible IMF agreement that also preserves large deposits that exist in the banking system. IMF demands for fiscal reform and discipline add to the tally of conditions which have no more been met by the current government than by its even more hapless predecessors and caretaker predecessors.

Cognizant of the IMF’s institutional behavior, several of the country’s top independent economists and institutional finance experts – many of which with experience working in international financial institutions, including the IMF – have collaborated with Executive Magazine in the production of a position paper that aimed at strengthening the government’s approach to negotiations with the IMF in 2025. The experts’ motivation was to help the new, reformist government in the face of external pressures and degraded institutional capacities, factors that led the experts and this magazine to undertake substantial analysis and draft 11 comprehensive recommendations. The fruits of this collaboration were published on the magazine’s web platform in May. 

The recommendations in this position paper included compliance with self-explanatory economic imperatives such as unification of the exchange rate, gradual implementation of a free-float system, and fulfillment of reform obligations on all stakeholder levels. The recommendations were anchored in the philosophies of holding all actors accountable, and rebuilding trust between the state, its citizens, and the financial system. Their foundational demand, however, was depositor rights; “deposits must be preserved as bank liabilities”.  

With regard to IMF demands for lowering the debt-to-income ratio to more customary or accepted levels, two things have to be understood.

The first notion is that extensive income and extraordinary wealth come with the moral and legal obligations to contribute proportionally to public goods and their provision. This truth does not need IMF curation. It is actually a core truth of functioning and sustainable capitalist orders. A common counter-argument, however, claims that private wealth is inherently more effective at generating jobs than state intervention or redistributive taxation. That claim is not a settled truth in advanced economies, nor is it reflected in the governance models of successful modern states.

The second principle concerns legality and constitutional order. In any jurisdiction that seeks durable and resilient growth, high profits—whether corporate, investment, or rent-derived—are not entitled to special protection merely because they may contribute to employment. A transparent and efficient political economy must protect public assets and ensure that the benefits of growth are shared. The inverse argument, now openly espoused by Lebanon’s Prime Minister—that depositors should be stripped of their assets to cancel or offset irresponsible public debt—is both unlawful and unconstitutional. It converts a crisis of governance into a justification for the destruction of private property and undermines the very basis of a legitimate economic system.

A not so new but pernicious IMF push

Under a new analysis by economist Mounir Rached, the president of the Lebanese Economic Association, the IMF is pushing for a 90 percent write-off of bank deposits, leaving, however, deposits of less than $100,000 relatively unscathed. The erasure of bank liabilities would allow Lebanon’s remaining debt to be stated at $30–32 billion and thus fall into the 1 to 1.5 times GDP range that the IMF seems as manageable. According to Rached, this would amount to a “financial crime” that violates depositors’ rights protected by the Lebanese Constitution.

This jibes with information – rumors and whispered revelations on plans for illicit haircuts that actually deserve to be called economic beheadings – relayed to me by sources close to concerned ministries and the central bank. According to these sources, the assets in the vaults of the central bank stand by current valuation at around $50 billion but do not cover the $80 billion of central bank liabilities to commercial banks.

The new joint plan by Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, and the ministries of finance and economy aims to restore BDL balance sheet solvency by closing a $30 billion FX gap. The gap is based on the fact that BDL currently owes banks $80 billion (which are private sector deposits at banks) but holds only $50 billion comprised of required reserves and gold.

To cover the shortfall, the plan proposes a $30 billion haircut on deposits. This reduction follows a previous auto-haircut imposed by banks and BDL on deposits which has already dropped from $123 billion in 2018 down to $80 billion in 2024. If this new haircut is applied, total deposits would fall further to about $50 billion.

This haircut has three components: cutting overpaid interest before the crisis, cut/reduce LBP-to-USD conversions post-Oct 2019, and exit illegal foreign funds. A very brief review of these components makes clear that:
-The “overpaid interest” cut is in contradiction to global banking standards and a breach of banks contract agreements with depositors.
-The cut on “LBP-to-USD conversions” punishes depositors for banks’ responsibilities who agreed to conduct their treasury transactions through the BDL to convert the LBP to USD.
-The elimination of illegal funds (under $5 billion) can be considered as system-cleansing and as such is acceptable.

Along with these measures, depositors will be subjected to illegal stratification by the size of the deposits.
-Depositors under $100k will be reimbursed over 4 years, only if the State and banks participate in the process.
-Depositors holding between $100,000 and $500,000 would receive zero-coupon bonds that are illiquid and practically have no value.
-Depositors with holdings above $500,000 face uncertain recovery prospects. Their effective assets recovery will be contingent on banks’ equity bail-in results and/or potential future Deposit Recovery Fund (DRF) returns.

In a nutshell, the new plan shows that, instead of preparing to pay back the state obligations to the central bank that underlie this $30 billion gap in hard-currency assets, our clever public servants want to newly impose a $30 billion “haircut” of large deposits as secondary erasure of deposits after depositors already suffered a $43 billion contraction in banked assets by 2024 when compared with their $123 billion deposit holdings at EOY 2018.

The problems with this plan include contract-law violations when reclaiming “overpaid” interest that was agreed upon between commercial banks and their corporate and private banking clients. The write-offs of effectively $30 billion in bank liabilities will also not translate into the strengthening of liquidity in the banking system nor will it guarantee actual full repayment of the remaining $50bn deposits. But the retroactive erasure of interest gains is counter to international contract law and violates numerous Lebanese laws and Article 15 of the constitution.

Moreover, economic analysis shows that even after return to nominal solvency, BDL’s assets remain mostly illiquid: Gold sales are legally prohibited under Law 42/86, unless this law is amended. The enterprises under BDL direct or indirect ownership (MEA, Casino, Intra) are practically not sellable unless and until their management is privatized and their profitability restored. Only mandatory reserves are liquid assets and can partially cover a portion of monies owed to depositors with holdings under $100,000. Thus, BDL solvency plan through a consequent haircut will neither translate into liquidity nor into a foreseeable actual full repayment of the remaining $50bn due to depositors.

In his critique of the scheme, LEA’s Rached further points out that the plan lacks any concrete framework for bank restructuring or recapitalization and will be unsuited for building confidence in the financial system. Neither does the scheme offer any exit path from Lebanon’s dominant cash economy. In terms of its rationale, BDL and the State justify this “exceptional” haircut to be driven by an assumed “systemic” nature of the crisis. But legally, as noted above, the haircut on retroactive gains and actions violates Lebanese laws, contractual agreements with banks and Article 15 of the Constitution (property rights). Economically, it undermines trust, liquidity, and investor confidence.

Rached emphasizes in a message to Executive that a genuine alternative plan has to be implemented in order to resolve the banking crisis. One such plan has already been developed by LEA and would feasibly and functionally resolve the crisis within less than one year.

Disregard for Lebanese legal tenets by the IMF is a more serious flagration of Lebanon’s constitutional principles and historic practices than the IMF seems to comprehend. Far worse from constitutional perspective is, however, the contemplation of such measures as demanded by the IMF on part of the Lebanese government. This is immolation, a ritual burnt offering of the constitution by its guardians. Immolation on the altar of hegemonic financial dictates. Our politicians might as well try to burn the whole country into the stone age.  

Changed realities

Other factors scream for new consideration. Recent upside gaps in local estimations of national GDP reached double-digit billions of dollars. The estimates of the Central Administration for Statistics (CAS) for 2023 show a nominal $10.2 billion rise from $21 billion in 2022. By such reassessments of recent GDP trends, the local numbers reveal upward divergence of Lebanon’s GDP from IMF numbers comes to whopping 30 percent.

Moreover, projections for 2025 that by local evidence are much more aligned with economic realities from traffic to retail shopping behaviors by consumers, put the nominal GDP back above the $40 billion mark. All in all, it cannot be denied that the economy of 2025, even if still uneven, in urgent further need of rebuilding, and deeply lacking in equality, looks incomparably better than the memories from each of the three preceding years.   

Lastly, apart from the perniciousness of IMF negotiations that seem to treat laws as nuisances and the far better than predicted trajectory of the economy due to private sector agency, better solutions have been put on the table by competent economists with passion for Lebanese recovery.

A recovery path proposed by economist Farid Boustany categorically rejects all cancellations or forced cuts of any-size deposits and suggests as legal path to recovery under which the government of Lebanon is obligated repay its debt to the central bank and recapitalize the latter, banks are mandated by law to strengthen their liquidity and capital. In this version of an exit from the financial doldrums, the central bank would tap into its reserves, which today stand at about $40 billion in gold and $11 billion in foreign-currency holdings, to inject liquidity and gradually return depositor funds. Boustany also sees merit in instituting a tax on past currency transactions as it would help reduce the financial gap.

For economist Saleh Nsouli, another expert with experience working in international financial institutions, negotiations with the IMF have been hampered by the fund’s disregard for large private and corporate depositors whose financial capabilities sustain employment and drive economic growth. In place of a sole focus on the protection of small depositors, Nsouli advocates for an alternative domestic program to IMF dictates.

His proposal priorities protecting of all depositor rights and injecting liquidity into the financial system. Parts of the central bank’s reserves, including gold, should be mobilized and deployed in providing depositors with cash tranche of 25 percent. The remaining 75 percent of their holdings owed to depositors should be released to them as time deposits with maturities of one to four years. These liquidity injections, which would invigorate the economy, should be coupled with forensic audits, accountability measures and reforms of the banking system. In this regard, the IMF should not be sought out as lender but relied on for technical assistance, helping Lebanon with expertise in tax, fiscal, and regulatory design questions.

These experts, using media platforms including Executive, have invested themselves into the search for a constructive outcome of Lebanon’s appeals to the IMF. This magazine alone has covered economy and policy and banking and finance topics in hundreds of expert comments and analytical articles. Given the latest corrections it would be irresponsible for the current administration to now, as it is nearing the end of its term but has yet to achieve crucial administrative and security reform obligations, rush in making concessions to the IMF. Our national priorities have shifted in the past 12 months since the fake ceasefire. It is unconscionable that the government of Lebanon should not discuss the continued rebuilding of the economy and the resolution of the financial system to greater depth in public consultations with economists and the many qualified stakeholders in the country.

From the eruption of the economic crisis, an agreement with the IMF has incessantly been framed as required for returning international confidence – and investments – to the Lebanese system. But while much has changed in the intervening years, the IMF’s fundamental positions have not moved. The recent Lebanese successes in seeing private sector investments and accessing international finance, such as the awarding of World Bank reconstruction and energy sector loans, shows that the phalanx of international financial institutions’ distrust in the Lebanese government has been disrupted positively. New financing realities are in the process of being created.    

Yet the current administration’s transparency and track record has been far from universal. Rebuilding mutual trust is the deepest need for all actors in the Lebanese polity. This cannot be done in any other way than through a dual process of delivering results and building consensus. Honest communication is part of the deal. Some Lebanese ministries have made great strides towards improving their performance, some even having ministers invest 12-and-more hour workdays and accepting the human capital contributions of highly qualified volunteers and academic institutions. Others seem stuck in the old patterns of glowing speeches that do not match actions in the tradition of clientelism and backroom dealings.

Must this weary public be left to wonder whether the prime minister, appointed because of his globally acknowledged commitment to justice, will skirt the very constitution he took an oath to uphold?

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Analysis

A war on reconstruction and return

by Maryam Alaouie
written by Maryam Alaouie

The recent Israeli airstrikes on the south of Lebanon have revealed a calculated shift in Israel’s military strategy. The deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure and attempts at reconstruction, from excavators and asphalt factories to olive trees and beehives, sends one clear message: there is no return to the south of Lebanon.

Since the ceasefire deal was announced on the 26th of November of last year, the Lebanese government has shown limited involvement in any post-war reconstruction efforts in the South. Today, almost a year later, according to Lebanese authorities, Israel has breached the deal over 2,500 times, yet the government has taken no action ­– a reality that has pushed many in the south to take matters into their own hands.

Machinery yards and cement factories targeted in Msayleh

Israel’s escalating airstrikes in October 2025 reveal a clear aim at disrupting infrastructure and reconstruction in the south of Lebanon. On the 11th, in the village of Msayleh, six heavy machinery yards that included 300 reconstruction vehicles such as bulldozers, excavators, trucks, and rollers, were targeted and destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.

Following the attack, Ahmad Tabaja, the owner of one of the warehouses affected, Tabaja Equipment Inc., issued a statement denouncing the attack and stating that Israel’s goal is to “prevent the reconstruction of towns and villages in the south of Lebanon,” adding that he does not belong to or work with any political party, as Israel claims to only target members of Hezbollah.

Furthermore, in another attempt to cripple reconstruction on the south of Lebanon, on the 17th of October, the Israeli army committed one of its heaviest airstrikes since the ceasefire deal, destroying an asphalt and cement manufacturing site near Ansar, in the district of Nabatiyeh. This attack, carried out by 12 Israeli air raids, as reported by the Lebanese National News Agency, destroyed concrete mixers, pumps, fuel tanks, and cranes. The site workers report that they lost the work of a lifetime.

“This is a war on construction, this is a war on the people of the south…they’re going to hit everything related to reconstruction, this is just the beginning, the worst is yet to come,” another factory worker in Ansar told local media.

Hitting the heart of the water supply

On the same day, Israel targeted one of the main sources of livelihood for every southerner: water.  A fuel depot that belongs to the South Lebanon Water Establishment (SLWE), the official public utility responsible for water distribution across all of southern Lebanon, was struck by Israeli airstrikes and lost more than 500,000 liters of fuel.

The Israeli attacks on essential water sources left 25 border towns without water after their networks were completely destroyed. According to SLWE, the estimated cost of repair is around 100,000,000 USD.

“It did not stop there,” Dr. Wassim Daher, President and General Director of SLWE, tells Executive. “Around 25 local pumping stations and 45 solar power systems used to operate these stations in the south were affected, in addition to major pumping stations that supply water to multiple towns, some serving more than 40 towns, such as the Taybeh, Wazzani, and Nabaa Al-Tasseh stations” he added.

Despite the continuous efforts of SLWE to provide water to the citizens in the south and carry out its daily tasks, the war has also impacted the mobility of its employees particularly maintenance workers.

“There has been an increased demand for water in certain areas north of the Litani River due to the displacement of residents from areas south of the river,” says Daher. “This situation has required extended pumping hours and higher water production, as well as the establishment of temporary water points in shelter centers, in coordination with governmental and non-governmental organizations and associations.”

The shortage of water supply in the south has made it harder for the people to return to their houses after the war, according to Daher. “Because,” he explains, “this directly affects the lives of citizens and, consequently, influences their decision to return to their towns and resume their activities, especially since many residents of border villages rely on agriculture.”

“The government is as good as nothing”

The crippling of the water infrastructure has contributed to the high displacement numbers reported. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of December 2024, roughly 178,817 civilians remain displaced and are unable to return to their homes in the south of Lebanon.

The scale of destruction and widespread displacement urgently necessitates the support of the government and its institutions, yet the near total absence of it has been all the more frustrating for southerners.

 “Assistance from the government?” laughs Abbas Hmadi – a young chef from the South whose family is trying to rebuild their home in Shabriha – when asked if they had received any help for the reconstruction process. “We did not receive assistance from anyone, the government is as good as nothing. The house my dad worked all his life to build in our village, Maroun Al -Ras, and cost him about 500,000 USD, is gone. We had another house in Shabriha, a village near Tyre, also gone. Our apartment in Dahye, in the area of Jamous is also gone.”

The family is now waiting for a government permit to excavate their land in order to rebuild. “We don’t know when – or if – we will get it, the government always seems to make things harder for the people instead of easier,” Hmadi says.

When asked why the family did not build in their own border village Maroun Al Ras, he explains, “The Israelis do not want us to rebuild — they are not even allowing us to excavate the land and remove the rubbles.”

The ecological backbone of the South

Houses, water, and roads are not the only forms of infrastructure Israel has been targeting; the ecological and agricultural infrastructure of the South—olive trees and beehives—have also been among the focuses. In June 2025, Israeli troops bulldozed olive groves in Meis El Jabal. The municipal leader in the village told local media, “they don’t want any signs of life…including olive harvest operations.”

Israel’s frequent use of white phosphorous has led to the destruction of thousands of olive trees. According to a report conducted by the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture and UN-ESCWA, between 6 October and 24 November 2023, over 53,000 olive trees were destroyed in 53 villages. What the olive trees represent to the southerners is not only a source of income, but a part of their environmental culture and heritage.

“My father has been growing olive trees with his bare hands for 40 years now, he lost more than 400 olive trees by Israeli strikes” Hmadi tells Executive.

The bees have not been spared either. The Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture reports that around 3,500 beehives were completely or partially damaged, putting the regions apiculture at risk. It does not stop at the bees themselves – those who care for them have also become targets. In June 2025, Israel killed a beekeeper in the village of Houla.

“From the people to the people”

Since the beginning of the war, residents of the south have lost all confidence in the government and its institutions to help them get back on their feet. This factor contributes to the existing solidarity between the people, making them rely even more on each other, help each other, and pull each other up through community-driven initiatives.

These initiatives come in different forms. In Ramyeh, Hussein Saleh, an activist and municipal council member in the Ramyeh Municipality, fled to the north during the war and started a grassroots campaign that helped more than 4000 southerners, through what he calls “The One Dollar Campaign.”

The name of the campaign was inspired by the monthly funding project ‘One Lebanese Pound’ launched by Sayed Mousa Sadr in the early 1960s as a part of his work on social welfare in the south of Lebanon.

The One Dollar campaign is made to help the people that are living in southern border villages. “It is for the people that stayed in their land, that are living with broken windows, collapsed walls and roofs ruptured by Israeli missiles. Being a one-dollar campaign encouraged people to collectively participate and pay even more than a dollar” explains Saleh. It helps with providing basic utilities like solar power panels, glass restoration, walls, roofs, and doors, before the winter arrives. The campaign includes other initiatives like collecting unwanted furniture and distributing them to those in need, through Saleh’s own means.

 “Just imagine, some of them are living across from the Israelis without even having electricity. I am not claiming to have ‘saved the south,’” adds Saleh. “The south needs billions of dollars to be rebuilt, but I refuse to sit and do nothing. I care about the people and these small acts have had a huge positive impact on their lives and spirits.”

It was work done from the people to the people, according to Saleh.

But how many One-dollar Campaigns would it take to rebuild the South? In the March 2025 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment report released by the World Bank, South Lebanon’s recovery and reconstruction costs are estimated at 11 billion USD, with 4.6 billion USD needed for the housing sector alone – much of this concentrated in the border villages and Nabatiyeh district.

The Strategy of Attrition

Beyond the physical losses of houses and loved ones, the war has taken a psychological toll on the people of the South. The evidence presented above suggest that the pattern of relentless flows of attacks, are not only for military control but have been designed to undermine the morale of the people and their power to resist. By systematically targeting different forms of infrastructure, the livelihood of southerners has deteriorated drastically.

Ramyeh, the village Saleh comes from, is among the five points where the IDF maintains illegal military presence. He explains that it is not fear that stops people from rebuilding, but common sense. “How can you rebuild under occupation? The Israelis are destroying every wall we try to build, but despite that, people in the south remain resilient and are fueled by the power of resistance.”

As the attacks continue on a daily basis and reconstruction is at a halt, the question remains: until when will the people in the south remain resilient and patient? And when will the government take action and prioritize the return and safety of the southerners from Israel’s clear intentions of occupation?

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Woman against local odds

by Rawan El Sayed
written by Rawan El Sayed

When I launched Becoming Social in the summer of 2024 in Tripoli, the economic hub of North Lebanon, I knew the odds weren’t in my favor. Tripoli wasn’t exactly known for being a marketing hub — and definitely not one led by a woman. But I also knew that change had to start somewhere, and I wanted to be part of that shift.

A year later, what began as a leap of faith has turned into a growing agency that’s helping redefine what modern marketing can look like in northern Lebanon. We’ve grown from a one-woman operation to a small but dynamic team handling over 15 clients across different sectors from hospitality and retail to beauty and tech, and that’s just the beginning.

From Global Experience to Local Purpose

After my graduation from The American University of Beirut in 2017, I joined large multinational agencies like M&C Saatchi and Omnicom Media Group working as a full-time employee and learning the ins and outs of the business. Later in 2021, I left for Paris, France where I earned my MBA from Université Paris-Saclay and worked with marketing teams handling European luxury and tech giants such as LVMH & SAP. Those years taught me discipline, structure, and the power of data-driven storytelling. I learned how to read markets through insights, how to translate numbers into creative impact, and how brands can build emotion even in hyper-competitive environments.

But while my career was growing, I felt a persistent pull toward home. Every visit back to Tripoli made me realize how much potential the city had — creative entrepreneurs, ambitious youth, and family-run businesses ready to grow — yet how little access they had to strategic marketing support. I didn’t want to keep contributing my expertise to already-established global brands when I could use it to build something new and impactful back home.

So, I made the decision to return and to exchange skyscrapers for seaside streets and international clients for local potential.

A Leap of Faith — and a Reality Check

Transitioning back wasn’t easy. Tripoli’s market operates very differently from the structured, fast-paced corporate world I came from. Here, marketing budgets are modest, word-of-mouth still drives many decisions, and clients often expect immediate results without understanding the long-term value of brand building.

In the first few months, I found myself explaining concepts that had become second nature abroad, from why a consistent content strategy matters to how paid advertising works. It wasn’t frustration that kept me going; it was curiosity. I wanted to understand why the market functioned this way and how I could adapt to it instead of trying to force it into a model that didn’t fit.

Measurable Growth — One Relationship at a Time

Our first clients came through referrals, mostly small businesses testing the waters of digital marketing. But by the end of our first year, Becoming Social had grown to handle a client portfolio of over 15 brands, we tripled our initial monthly revenue, and expanded services to include branding, paid advertising, influencer collaborations, and outdoor marketing.

Today, about 70 percent of our clients are based in Tripoli, while the rest were projects that came from Beirut, Dubai, and even Paris — a sign that the quality of work coming from Tripoli is starting to attract attention beyond the city.

This growth didn’t happen overnight. It came from listening — really listening — to what business owners were struggling with. Whether it was a family-owned mattress manufacturing company trying to modernize and globalize its image without losing authenticity, or a new coffee shop unsure how to position itself, we approached each project as a partnership, not a transaction.

Facing Challenges Head-On

Of course, running a female-led agency in a conservative, male-dominated environment comes with its own set of challenges. Early on, I often found myself being second-guessed in meetings or having to “prove” my credibility to male clients.

There were also logistical challenges in the form of delayed payments, fluctuating exchange rates, and clients hesitant to commit to long-term retainers because of Lebanon’s economic uncertainty.

To navigate this, I built flexibility into our business model. We started offering phased strategies that allowed clients to test results before scaling. We also relied heavily on measurable KPIs showing clear before-and-after metrics on engagement, reach, and conversion.

That data became my armor. Once clients saw the numbers, the skepticism faded.

Balancing Empathy and Data

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that marketing isn’t just about algorithms or aesthetics; it’s about empathy. Understanding what people need, fear, and aspire to is what turns a strategy into a story.

At Becoming Social, we combine analytics with intuition. For instance, when we worked with a local café that had been struggling post-pandemic, we didn’t just focus on boosting followers. We told their story of resilience, community, and the simple joy of sharing a cup of coffee with friends. The result? Their customer visits doubled within three months, and their brand became part of the city’s cultural fabric.

Those are the wins that matter to me most.

If there’s one thing entrepreneurship has taught me, it’s that growth is rarely linear. You’ll face setbacks, self-doubt, and sleepless nights. There were times I wondered if I’d made the right choice — if I should’ve stayed abroad where things were “easier.”

But every time a local business tells me, “You helped us see our value,” I’m reminded why I came back.

I’ve learned to celebrate progress, not perfection. To embrace mentorship — both giving and receiving. And to surround myself with people who share the same vision: that Tripoli’s story is worth telling.

Why Tripoli, Why Now?

Tripoli is often underestimated — but it’s a city brimming with ideas and creativity. The youth here are digitally savvy and hungry to learn, yet they lack platforms to showcase their talent. That’s why I’ve started collaborating with local universities and creative hubs to mentor students in digital strategy and branding.

The goal isn’t just to grow my agency; it’s to build an ecosystem where marketing talent can thrive locally instead of seeking every opportunity abroad.

As a woman leading an agency in Tripoli, I often get asked if it’s difficult. My answer? Yes, but it’s worth it. Because every challenge is also a chance to redefine what leadership looks like.

I’m no longer just building a business. I’m building a belief that women can lead agencies, shape narratives, and create economic value in their own cities.

The journey of Becoming Social has only just begun. But if this first year has proven anything, it’s that Tripoli is ready for transformation — and so are we.

Our mission remains simple yet ambitious: to break barriers, elevate marketing, and help Tripoli’s businesses shine as brightly as they deserve.

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Job posting

Part-Time Proposal Writer

by Executive Editors
written by Executive Editors

Position Overview:
Executive is seeking a part-time proposal writer to assist in executing funding strategies that align with the magazine’s editorial calendar and strategic objectives. The ideal candidate will identify and pursue funding opportunities, draft compelling grant proposals, and manage partner relationships to ensure transparency and accountability.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Identify and assess potential grants, sponsorships, and institutional partnerships
  • Write and edit concept notes, proposals, and reports tailored to donor priorities and Executive’s mission
  • Coordinate with the editorial team to align funding with ongoing and upcoming coverage

Qualifications:

  • Proven experience in proposal writing, and fundraising or partnership management, and NGO sectors.
  • Strong understanding of donor landscapes (local, regional and international).
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English (Arabic and/or French are a plus).
  • Strong organizational and project management skills with the ability to work independently.

Commitment:

  • Part-time position (approx. 15–20 hours per week).
  • Flexible schedule with regular coordination meetings.

To Apply:
Please send your CV, a brief cover letter outlining relevant experience, and one sample of a grant proposal or partnership pitch (if available) to [email protected] with the subject line: Proposal Writer Application – [Your Name].

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Brand Voice

THE MANY MYTHS AROUND SMOKE-FREE ALTERNATIVES

by Philip Morris Management Services
written by Philip Morris Management Services

In a world of misinformation, separating fact from fiction can be challenging at best. Information overload is everywhere, causing confusion and doubt in many areas of life. One such area is smoke-free technology.

Giving up nicotine and tobacco altogether is the best choice a smoker can make, but many don’t. Where smoking was once the only option, smoke-free alternatives now exist to give smokers who don’t quit, a better choice too.

Busting the myths around smoke-free products can prevent informational roadblocks and help more smokers leave cigarettes behind for good. That’s why it’s always important to stop, think, and check whether things are true or just popular belief.

So, what are the most common myths about smoke-free products?

MYTH

“Nicotine is the most harmful thing about smoking.”

FACT

Burning is the most harmful thing about smoking. Nicotine is addictive, but smoke produced by burning is the primary cause of smoking-related diseases.

MYTH

“Smoke-free alternatives are the same as smoking cigarettes.”

FACT

Quitting is best, but smoke-free alternatives are a much better choice than continuing to smoke because they don’t produce harmful smoke. When there’s no smoke, the levels of harmful chemicals can be considerably reduced.

MYTH

“Tar is present in smoke-free products.”

FACT

Smoking-related tar is a weight measurement of leftover particles in smoke when nicotine and water are removed. Smoke-free products don’t produce smoke, so tar is not a relevant unit of measurement.

MYTH

“Tobacco and nicotine products are all the same as each other.”

FACT

That’s not true. Products that burn tobacco and create smoke can be much more harmful than alternatives that deliver nicotine without smoke.

MYTH

“Better alternatives to smoking don’t exist.”

FACT

Better alternatives DO exist. As the name suggests, smoke-free alternatives can emit significantly fewer and lower levels of harmful chemicals compared to cigarettes. This makes them a better choice for adults than continuing to smoke.

Smoke-free products deliver nicotine without burning, which means they don’t produce smoke and can contain far lower average levels of harmful chemicals than cigarettes. This makes them a far better choice for those that don’t quit. As with any product, it’s important to choose an alternative that’s been backed by science, tested thoroughly, and comes from a reputable retailer.

When it comes to advances in science, technology, and tobacco, the right information can really make a difference. By clearing up confusion, adult smokers could be encouraged to make better decisions for their health.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SMOKE-FREE PRODUCTS, VISIT OUT WEBSITE

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Economics & PolicyEntrepreneurship

Institutional heft in tumultuous times:

by Thomas Schellen
written by Thomas Schellen

Just having celebrated its centennial, the Lebanese American University is starting its second century as an institution that is deeply invested in Lebanon’s socioeconomic transformation. A glancing view at the past and ongoing pivots of the institution – from “girls’ school” to women’s college to liberal arts college and internationally active university – and the various external shocks that LAU had to overcome in the past 60 years and up to the latest war on Lebanon, gives the impression that the institution itself is a somewhat under researched case study in social and academic transformations. It is also a case study for organizational leadership that is inseparable from the American and the Lebanese heritages in both scholarly and personality profiles. Executive discussed the institution’s constructive but meandering path with Chaouki Abdallah, the university’s 10th president.  

It has been one year at the end of June since the news of your appointment. You have assumed your position officially in October of 2024, a very conflicted moment in Lebanon. But before you agreed to leave your position at a large US university, how long did it take for LAU to find you and convince you to assume the role of the president at the Lebanese American University?

I have no idea how long the whole process took them. They started talking to me two or three months before we reached the agreement for me to come. I was at Georgia Tech as head of research when I got an email from the search firm, asking if I am interested [in the position at LAU]. I had a standard answer of saying ‘thank you so much but I am happy where I am’. They responded by calling me and suggesting that I might want to speak to the chair of the board [of LAU]. Given that it was a Lebanese university, I accepted a call from the chair of the board and we talked for a long time, like 30 minutes. He told me some things that intrigued me. They made me say ‘ha, I am interested’.

One thing that he said was that universities in Lebanon are consequential, almost the last line of defense, or the last institutions that are still delivering all their missions, so that people who graduate go on to do great things. He talked about LAU but also all other universities. And then he told me that during the economic collapse LAU took money out of their endowment in order to make sure that students were able to pay and attend classes. This led me to coming to see the board of LAU in NYC. My wife, who is American, is from Atlanta, and we always thought it would be my last post [to be at Georgia Tech] but she said, “why don’t you go and talk to them. You thought about what you can give back to the country at one point, so let us.”

On the macro scale of things, your arrival at LAU coincided with the university’s centennial, the hundredth anniversary year. Entering the second century is a hard inflection point or an incremental transition for LAU, as well as a psychological marker of importance indicating that you have something else to do now. What is this “something else” that you see as important for LAU’s second century?

To me, universities, and especially universities that are not for profit, are anchor institutions. They are not a business or bank. They are institutions that anchor society. The mission of the university on the highest level is to generate and propagate knowledge, and then become more than that. It becomes a mission to create the environment. It used to be that a university was only concerned about the student when they came to us and would then forget about them after they leave us [as graduates]. That is no longer the case. Before they come to us, we work with schools and we work with alumni. In addition to that, we now are a healthcare system provider.

After the first hundred years, LAU is part of the fabric of society, especially in higher education. The next hundred years, or the next chapter of the story entails the mission that we do a lot more to keep some of the talent that we produce, in the country. Lebanon is a brain factory. We export talents. We import everything else, but we export people who want to do great things for other places. It is not a question of wanting to keep everybody in here because the market and the society cannot absorb all the talent. However, I saw a recent study saying that 65 percent of college graduates aim to leave the country but only 16 percent actually want to leave. The others see no other choice but leaving.

Most people would like to stay if they have the opportunity. The role of the universities now is to create that [environment allowing people to stay and find careers] above and beyond what they already do, which is provide education. How will we do that? One of the areas that I worked with when I was with Georgia Tech, an area that really mashes with the Lebanese spirit, is entrepreneurship. How do you got people to start their own companies instead of just waiting to get hired by a bank or a company? Well, there is an art to that and we have a lot of entrepreneurship. The other area that is extremely important is for universities to be connected to their society, specifically in the research of solving problems.

There is a role for longer-term research and a role for research in basic sciences but there is an increasing need, and especially in a place like Lebanon, to solve problems, such as the problems that EDL has or that municipalities have in treating water, or that the government has in other areas. So I am promoting applied research. Academia has to be a part of society; it cannot be an ivory tower.

LAU in the last century was perceived for a while as “that girls’ school” or a second rate institution for those who could not get to the top university in Lebanon. That was something that people mentioned when discussing LAU even in the early 2000s. But at the current juncture, when Lebanon is still in a societal state of fragmentation, how do you see the role of LAU? Are you a potential unifier of society? Are you still strictly associated with the liberal American Arts tradition in education, or even the earlier missionary tradition that LAU was once founded under?

Let me start with the premise of the question. At one time, there were no universities, or places that educated women. LAU filled that very important role. It was [Beirut College for Women] and before that, since 1835, the American School for Girls. Many people I meet today from the Gulf, or from Lebanon, often their mothers went to LAU, because there were at the time no universities educating women. We had a super-critical role and we are proud of that heritage and our origin. Having said that, how do we see ourselves today? We are a global university. We do believe in the American liberal arts education and its ideals because, if you do it right, it is the best model anywhere. In the US they have applied it rightfully for a long time. Now, there is a lot of pressure on this modal, for one reason or another, but it is very important to have the general education. It is important to have taken history and philosophy before you become a physician or an engineer.

Are we a unifier? I think the role of universities by definition is to make students safe to have ideas, not to make ideas safe for the students. We are not here to tell people what they like to hear. We are a unifier in the sense that we people get educated, and if you do it right, they learn how to question and to ask why. The important part of college education is not the material that you take a course on or the skills that you learn. You can do that by taking a short course. The important part is learning that you don’t know everything.

You mentioned that you see education as something that best is not done with a strong profit motive or focus on making money. On the other hand, the economic impact of a university on society is a measurable quantity and important in assessing the value of a provider. In 2016, the office of institutional research at LAU endeavored to gauge the economic impact of LAU on Lebanon and put the number at around $900 million, or 1.4 trillion LBP at the time, which was relative to a GDP of around 40 or 45 billion dollars. How do you assess the economic impact of LAU at this point in time, as the economy is emerging from the crisis years and still has a long climb ahead in order to climb back?

When I mentioned that the university should not aim for profit I meant it should make enough money to break even and fulfill the mission. But the impact of universities is huge, economically. Just by the fact that we exist here, we buy [many things]. We have an impact, and our graduates have an impact. The ones who stay here will hopefully not only make good money but also pay taxes. According to studies, college educated persons stay married longer, are healthier, live longer, and contribute more to society. The benefits of education transcend the immediate benefits to the person who gets the education and extend to everybody else. I am aware of that study [on the economic impact of LAU], and I think we need to do this on a yearly basis. I think we should do it for all the universities. In fact, one of the things that I see right now as lacking severely, is a center or place where studies on the impact of X on everything – X in this case being higher education – are being done. We are thinking about how to do that. If you ask me how I would assess the total economic impact [of LAU] at this point, I couldn’t even guess. Our budget today is in the neighborhood of $300 million including the hospital. That is the immediate economic impact.

So is the indirect impact impossible to measure at the moment?

Studies I have seen speak of three to almost four dollars in indirect economic impact for each dollar in direct impact.

And with the benefits to every soft drink vendor, brewer, pizza baker and taxi driver, there will be another multiplier for calculating the induced impact and ancillary economic activity around a university.

That is the type of things that needs to be researched, vetted, and eventually communicated. The way I would frame it is to ask: if you do not have this university or this campus, what would be the loss? You would not have the $300 million [of our budget]. Above and beyond that, it is about formulas and studies by economists. I think it should be done throughout [the country] and under normal circumstances, all the universities would submit data to an entity that is under the state, and the state will collate all information and have economists do the calculations and publish them. I am familiar with people who do this in every state in the US. I did it when I was in New Mexico, and we had people doing it in Georgia, and so on. To put it in perspective, at the last university that I was at, the budget was $2.5 billion and the impact to the state was $10 billion. I also saw a study on another state where they did a deep analysis and estimated that the impact is 3-4 dollars to the state for every dollar that is spent on higher education. This does not yet consider the long-time value creation. It is on a yearly basis where the impact for every dollar spent, is for three to four dollars. I myself do not calculate the economic impact of educated people in this way. As I mentioned, educated people will be much more involved and the impact of the university is not just economic. But today’s economic reality [in Lebanon] is such that, if I don’t have the [LAU] university and assume a four to one economic multiplier, I will immediately lose $1.2 billion in the economic activity of the country.

Continuing the discussion on value creation by the university in terms of entrepreneurial and industrial activity, I want to inquire about the situation of your affiliated hubs. Is there an operating entrepreneurship hub and an industry hub? How much value do these create?

 We have an entity that focuses on the interaction with the business world, with companies. We also have the Makhzoumi entrepreneurial innovation center. Our assets by numbers at the university are the students, not the president and faculty. There is one president and 300 faculty, and there are 9,000 students. That is what we build on and that is what the innovation hub does. Our hub at LAU is hosting 15 companies per year and we need to reach an output that is much bigger. By the way, AUB and USJ have something similar. Everybody has something of this type but it really needs to be scaled up to the size of Lebanon. I do not have the latest numbers, but Lebanon has about 200,000 college students. 80,000 of them are at the Lebanese University. I think USJ is 12,000, I am 9,000 and AUB is 8,000. Then there are for-profit universities, the largest is LIU but I don’t know what they do. But the bottom line is that we need to get to [national] scale. We need to really connect these hubs and innovation centers together.

Turning to another topic of the time, in several recent speeches, such as a presentation at a conference at Phoenicia Hotel, you have talked about Artificial Intelligence, AI, and have a tech background. Are you planning a center for AI at LAU?

I think AI is something that is not to be isolated at one place. I know that my colleagues at AUB are creating a college focused on computing and so forth. My belief is that AI belongs everywhere. However, since everyone is [moving into AI], you cannot have everyone doing their own thing. You need to create an AI hub, which was the model I used at Georgia Tech. We are using AI in our operations, we are using AI in medicine, we are using AI in teaching when we are creating courses for every student but also we are creating and delivering courses for executives outside. My point is that there will not be a college [for AI] or something separated. There will be an AI hub to coordinate all of these activities and we are probably launching this in the fall. What I am right now trying to figure out is ‘what does LAU do in AI?’ and I am discovering every day people either working in AI, wanting to work in AI, or doing research on AI. AI is going to be the substrate on which a lot of the business is going to be done, internally and externally. We are delivering courses, doing designs based on this, operationally we are [using it], we are evaluating people based on some AI tools, and so on. I probably spend 30 percent of my time interacting with an AI agent.

I will not have anything to complain about this, as long as you are still occasionally interacting with a real life journalist…

I think you are safe for several reasons. Number one, you are asking questions that no AI agent would come up with. Your questions take our conversation into new directions. Number two, even under the most optimistic scenarios, creativity will always come from humans, not from a machine. The one test for me is humor. AI agents can now pass the Turing test but ask AI to tell you a joke and see if it is funny.

In a final non-AI induced shift of my questioning, I want to ask you about the social angle of LAU activities. This is specifically about the fact that you had very important, and well publicized programs funded by the United States Agency for International Development, which up until this year has been funding activities around the world, including education. How did you experience this cessation of USAID funding as institution, and how did you cope?

We had about 20 million dollars impact on our budget. It was the second largest source of funding for us, and the impact was huge. We are still dealing with it. We said we are going to finish the students that we have and took this upon ourselves to take care of the students we have. We are not going to be able to do the same thing that we used to do, or as much as we used to do. We had a couple of programs [with US public funding], one was the USAID and another one was with MEPI, the Middle East Peace Initiative. That one is still ongoing. It is smaller but it has funding for the students.

In dealing with this issue, we are looking at the whole revenue mix of the university. We are a private university and after USAID going away, we get 90-some percent of our revenue from tuition. This is not sustainable, because we in turn give more than 50 percent in financial aid. We cannot [keep raising tuition payments] and maintain the quality as well as the financial support and so on. We are looking at other ways of doing things, such as diversifying our tuition base. We have a campus in New York now where we hopefully will generate some revenues. We have a successful online program which needs to be scaled. But we also are looking at areas beyond tuition. One thing [in revenue diversification] that I am focusing a lot on, is fundraising and philanthropy. We are trying to raise more funds for our endowment. Our endowment has been okay over the years, but we had to dip into it, as I mentioned, during the economic crisis and had to do the same thing during the summer war [of 2024]. The plan is now to raise some funds, leverage our international connections, our alumni, and others, and frankly try to take advantage of opportunities that we perhaps did not have before, namely the opportunity that Lebanon hopefully stays on this path and reaches a state where it becomes again an attractive place for international students.

Would you like to have a campus in Aleppo, Homs, or Hama?

Syria is an interesting place, for a lot of reasons. We are ultimately looking at a global LAU strategy. There are many places in the world where there is potential, including places where there is a lot of Lebanese diaspora who want an American education. It could be in Africa, in Latin America, and many places but [the strategy] has to fit together. My criteria are twofold: one is if it is part of our mission and we therefore have to do it and figure out how to pay for it. The other criterion is if something is not part of our mission but will generate money and resources that feed into the mission. Syria, under these criteria, is not immediate but it certainly is on the horizon.

Do you have a fundraising target for filling up your endowment?

Yes we do. We are now at 650 [million USD] and have a campaign to go up by about 200 to 250 million. But at four percent [interest returns] per year, we need to get to about a billion [dollars in the endowment] in order to have $40 million per year in interest. If we can get there, I can operate the financial aid more comfortably, and so on. Ultimately, by my back of the envelope calculation, we need about $1 billion and will probably get to $850 or 900 [million].

Is the current scholarship and financial support model still viable or will it have to change over the long term?

No university can do [without this model]. Otherwise we can only admit people who can afford to pay. You will always have to have financial aid based on need and on academic [merit]. You need to provide that to be a university in the full sense of the word. Otherwise you are either depending on one source of funding where that source can dictate your decisions, or you only accept only people who can pay, regardless of their ability. This is a model that for profit universities apply: you pay, you get in. That is not something that I think is the mission of a true university. But financial aid cannot be 50 percent, that is too much. My goal would be to reach 30 to 40 percent.

To return to the beginning of this conversation, you followed the call to LAU one year ago and came here during a very conflicted time. The past academic year was a period of several shocks, not only in the region and aggression on Lebanon, but also of shocks in the realm of academia that forced out people such as the president of Columbia University or confronted Harvard University with radical cuts in their funding by the federal government in the US. You also said in this interview that you do not see the ivory tower model as the future of education. So after this one year with commitment to LAU, would you say that you escaped the American academic ghetto to the freedom of the academic province of Lebanon or would you rather still be in Atlanta in sunny Georgia?

I want to answer this from a few angles. First of all, my friends in the US thought that I knew something at the time. Of course, I did not. But it is a very challenging time for higher education everywhere. The many reasons for this have to do with culture, with politics, and with finance. In Lebanon, higher education has always been the road to the next level. My family is a great example. My father is a stone mason, with eight children, had them college educated, and today every single one of us is three levels higher in the socioeconomic or the financial order than my father was. It is very important to keep that in mind that one role or aspect of higher education is to continue to help individuals to have a good career and good income.

At the same time, there is an opportunity for us in Lebanon right now, because there are a lot of people, young professors or young graduates, who perhaps did not consider coming back last year and were planning to stay not only in the US but other places. But either because of the positive trajectory that Lebanon is on, or because of restrictions on immigration in other places, people could be attracted back to Lebanon and one of the things we need to ask is how can we attract those people? How to make joining this [country] enough of an enticing opportunity that is not having people say we can come and visit for a while but will leave as soon as possible.

Is your identity then split between being a permanent contingency planner and a strategist for permanent development?

Yeah, but a I think a good strategist is someone who thinks in terms of scenarios. The plan will always change. As the saying goes, a plan does not survive its first encounter with reality. But if you do not have a plan, you are always reacting and switching. We have a lot of this in the country and at LAU. We have always been reacting and existing in this constant crisis mode. When you put a plan together, you adapt. You may have to switch but you stick with the plan. My plan is to make LAU sustainable not just financially but also produce the economic impact, do the research on the economic impact, and the entrepreneurship aspect, and so on. I may not be able to do something when people, for example, say they will not support the entrepreneurship event. But that does not mean that I do not stay focused—and I think that people have to work towards this mind shift. And all of that relies on information, on data that you can extract and draw real insight from, versus saying ‘so and so said this’ or ‘this is how we did it before’. That is the other cultural shift: to try to be data informed in our decision making.

How many years do you give yourself to work toward this goal or achieve this goal?

My term is four years and so it is three more years. It is a work in progress and I am currently assembling a team and we are getting some things done. By the time I finish my term, we will see. Either my wife will tell me ‘you come back’ or she will say “I” ’ll come and join you’.   

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Q&A

The linchpin of leapfrogging:

by Thomas Schellen
written by Thomas Schellen

The human being by conventional wisdom and scientific study is to a very large part a creature of habit. Discovering and applying the principles that allow individuals and businesses to change entrenched behaviors to become more productive, is what makes or breaks social adaptation and economic reason. In a democracy’s institutional behavior, the quest for greater productivity and societal relevance is like the search for the philosopher’s stone of governmental sustainability, or a transformative magic potion that facilitates institutional behavior change and speed of progress by a state and its institutions in service to its sovereign. For an insider perspective on Lebanon’s current challenges towards this end, Executive sat down with Fadi Makki, the minister of state for administrative reform. 

When the office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR) was established back in 1995, its very name stood for an important element in putting Lebanon’s post-conflict public sector on the right development track. As such, OMSAR soon became associated in people’s mind with the activities of UNDP in supporting the Lebanese public sector. Compared to the ministry’s role back then, what is different about the “new” OMSAR today?

As you are aware, OMSAR has been a project-driven ministry. If you have funding, [OMSAR] can work. If you don’t have funding, it has nothing. My predecessors never thought of institutionalizing OMSAR. It had great features in good days, being agile, quick and a magnet for funding. It worked beautifully in times of abundance. But when dire times occurred, the whole thing literally collapsed. 2020 was when OMSAR collapsed and that is when we realized that we should have created capacity, talked about sustainability, and have institutionalized. There were so many learnings. I have inherited what is like a collapsed temple. It has legacy, it has history. It also has some kind of mandate but [this mandate] is not promulgated in law that was adopted in parliament. [The mandate} is not an actual law but was created by the Council of Ministers.

My first task when I came here four months ago, was to reassemble the team. I looked who is still there, who left that I could bring back, and where I could acquire new human resources. How could I be creative in obtaining support. There is so much innovation because “nécessité fait loi”, necessity is the mother of invention. I was eager to open different ways to find resources. I discovered that there is much that you can source from volunteering. You can achieve much with a sort of advanced internships from graduate students from top universities. One could attempt reskilling of whoever was left, the few dozens of people that I still have at the ministry. Re-skilling is something that was never thought about before. You can re-skill, which we did. At the same time, you need funding. We are now using the likes of grants from the EU, UNDP, the Germans and others too, to support what we have, not fully replace. What is different from the old times is that we are not running only on grant money but that we are re-skilling, and using sources such as volunteering and pro-bono support form universities and we are also oiling the wheels for additional funding. Finally, for projects without owner, we are trying to obtain some loans, which speaks for the World Bank loan on digital transformation.

So there are now three main channels of budgeting for OMSAR, one avenue through volunteering and pro bono contributions, one avenue would be through grant money, and one avenue would be debt finance? So there would be no revenue from the usual fiscal sources and taxation?

I have a small budget – the smallest in all the cabinet at about $600,000 – which I use for advisors. OMSAR is not a burden on taxpayers. And getting a loan for IT and technology would be an investment, not an [operating loan], because it has a high return on investment and would trigger and boost [development].

How much of your operational calculation is based on volunteering for the public good? It is a fascinating concept that we witnessed for example through civil society initiatives to light up streets in Beirut in the darkest days of 2021. How much of your mission as a project ministry are you able to fulfill with volunteer contributions?

   Quite a lot. My ministry is 37 people. That is what I inherited. Of those, the professionals, meaning people with degrees, number one third. I have effectively 10 to 12 people that we have to re-skill. I have 20 more who are volunteers or sourced through grants and minimal contracting. So essentially I managed to triple our capacity in creative ways. This said, I am suffering [from human capital depletion] because with more people, I can unlock additional funding. [We need] people who can write concept notes, who can write proposals. We see a lot of good will in the donor community, but we cannot just tell them what we want. That kind of give and take requires advanced [human] resources, someone who has done some project management.

What are currently your most important projects?

Senior recruitment absorbs most of my capacity. I have three pillars; one is admin reform which comprises senior recruitment and the actual reform agenda of restructuring the public administration, the second pillar is digital transformation, and the third, anti-corruption. They go together. You cannot do anti-corruption without digital transformation, and we cannot do that without restructuring the administration. You cannot restructure without recruiting senior experts to oversee administrative reform. It is really a very nice framework that I oversee.

As I said, senior recruitment absorbs most of my capacity, simply because the sheer volume of demand on recruitment is incredible. In the first few months, we had openings for about 24 [senior] positions, between CDR, Ogero, and three regulatory authorities – telecom, civil aviation, and electricity –the privatization [council], Rachid Karami Fair, and a cannabis regulatory authority. These have all been open. We completed two sets of positions, filling eight positions at CDR, and one at Ogero. And [very shortly], we will have four sets of appointments to announce, which will be a very high load. As I speak today, we are looking at the imminent filling of positions at the Electricity Regulatory Authority, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, the [Higher Council of Privatization and PPP], and Tele Liban. These are almost 20 positions in senior capacity, and the recruitment process has been very demanding.

We meet every morning on this topic of senior recruitment where we discuss our targets and issues such as scoring [of candidates], interviewing, discrepancies, arbitration needs, coordination of experts, etc. It is really a big operation and I have been trying to have less personal involvement but there is fire fighting to be done all the time.

Is there still a component of sectarian allocation in the process of appointing ranking civil servants?

Unfortunately, yes. For example, we were told that the president of CDR is Sunni so we had to look at Sunni candidates only. We had a bit more than 30 percent of candidates that were non-Sunni but only looked at Sunnis.

In terms of willingness and desire of qualified candidates by their professional background, is there a supply overhang or a demand overhang, meaning an overabundance of top candidates for each position or a desperate deficit in finding enough technically and personality-wise qualified candidates who want to work as premier civil servants for the Lebanese people?  

There is a very interesting metric, which is the number of people who are applying for a position that has not “normally” been associated with their sect. I have that number, and I want to see more of that. If I am catholic and thus don’t apply for a position, such as president of CDR which has historically been held by a Sunni person, my not applying is a sign that I do not trust the system even though I heard the President and cabinet promising reform and talking about the reshuffling of positions. We have been looking at this figure as an important metric of trust.

Are you a builder of meritocracy?

Within constraints. There are certain rules that we are operating within. When we grade candidates, the information for name, sect, and gender is masked, so the people who are evaluating, don’t know who they are evaluating. But to be realistic, on another level, we can look at the sect filter. It is meritocracy in the sense that those who we are naming in the short list, are the best. But it is not always the case that we are able to attract the very best from outside [of electronic recruitment channels on the platform of OMSAR]. That is why we are wondering if we need some room for head hunting.

Do you use any AI tool in the process?

We got an offer recently. Suppose we have about 640 candidates for CDR positions. What we currently do is evaluate against minimum requirements – if a candidate meets them or not – and then a second filter, get the score, get the civil service score, and then a third score. It is really scientific. One interviewing company came to me and said, they could do that in one hour, providing a ranking and recommendation without even needing to short list, based on the competency framework that we give them. However, I do not think that this is ready yet. It could be deployed with some validation but I don’t think it is perfectly legal. In a bid to be entrepreneurial, I am going to ask people to give us the permission to experiment with this, just to evaluate if the AI is reaching similar results as the official process. But principally, the limitations of AI would have to be disclosed and the perception of using an AI tool would need to be managed carefully.

As you were saying, there was no real institution building at OMSAR during the project-driven 25 years of activity before the collapse of 2020. Why?

Not at OMSAR, and not at other institutions. I will tell you why. I was a beneficiary. I was director general at the Ministry of Economy from 2003 to 2005 and I at that time benefited from the technical assistance that OMSAR provided to the MoE, helping us in creating the planning and performance monitoring function. OMSAR wanted us to create a unit but we could not recruit at that time [due to a public sector hiring stop], so we could not populate that unit with staff. So we were enacting focal points, which means asking someone who is doing other things to also be responsible for performance planning, which is not ideal. I do not like focal point as a concept. Almost 25 years later, we still do not have planning functions at every ministry. It is still one of my top priorities to create such planning functions. But I want it through creation of units. It might sound strange to say that we want to hire in staffing new units in the administration, but I do not see any other way to build a public administration.

The administration is no longer as bloated as it once was. We are running with 30 percent of needed capacity and sometimes there are even more vacancies. Therefore, we can no longer speak about implementing reform without adding staff while reskilling existing manpower and letting some go who can no longer fit.

In the mission statement on the OMSAR website, the three pillars are good governance, capacity building, and digital transformation. Anti-corruption is of course intrinsic to good governance, but the original mission focus on building capacity makes it sound somehow like OMSAR in the past was tasked with capacity building – but without building OMSAR’s own institutional capacity. Isn’t this a bit of a logical incoherence?

Yes, OMSAR was tasked with building capacity without building its own capacity first. This was a major shortcoming and that is why we are trying to avoid this by becoming institutionalized and perhaps create it as proper ministry, not as office of a minister of state. Right now it is a state minister’s office that is tasked with admin reform. In order for the donors to say that it is the most important ministry, it has to be a ministry for admin reform. It is on everybody’s mind that we need to do financial reform but at the same time we need to do admin reform. Without it, you can no longer do proper implementation of governance. Therefore, the time is right to properly institutionalize from inside of the ministry so that it becomes on-par with the big ministries.

Admin reform has been done on contractual basis with funding coming from here and there, but senior administrative appointments are here to stay and we need to think of something, a mechanism to contract people into senior positions, constantly upskill them, shift them and move them around. That human resource funding and strategy is what we need to play more and more fully. 

You mentioned several times the concept of skill building, reskilling, or upskilling. This brings to my mind that you developed a paper and whole study on e-readiness back in 2003, one in which OMSAR found this e-readiness to be low or wanting in the administration and elsewhere. Today the e-readiness seems still to be wanting but at the same time, we usually mean a totally different concept when one talks about e-readiness in context of a digital society, not just such things like landline penetration rates and basic ICT infrastructures. What does the high intensity and speed of digital development mean for your quest of reskilling people at OMSAR? How difficult is it to re-skill people?

It is difficult but it equally is an opportunity. Because you could leapfrog. We lost so many [of our administrative human] resources. Therefore, and I am talking here about the core administrative functions, the fiscal burden is no longer [as high as] it used to be. Pensioners are a separate consideration and I do not want to talk about the situation in the military. The hard-core administration is nothing [in terms of cost] compared to what it was before. This is a golden opportunity to invest in those [civil servants] who are remaining. We want to give those who stayed skills in planning, digital transformation, performance monitoring, and some technical skills.

At the same time, you want to bring in a very limited number [of new people]. You no longer need a full cache. This cache is now two thirds vacant. Yet, we don’t want to refill every position. We want to transform the administration and make it more agile, more compact, and create a modern ministry. At the same time, we want [to hire people] to fill new administrative units of HR functions, planning and performance monitoring, and digital transformation functions. We need to map the administration and reskill some to fill the new functions, hire for the new functions and let some [people] go from the old functions. At the same time, we want to reengineer the [government] services. Technology and AI gives us the opportunity to do that. Its leapfrogging because you do not need anymore to automate the administration as it is. You could simply short-circuit many processes and cut down on red tape. From user perspective, there could be many cuts in the services value chain. So the sequence is restructuring, reengineering the services, and then filling positions to support these services.

Leapfrogging is something that has been called for by OMSAR but that Lebanon somehow has not been good at over the past 30 years. Another hot term in corporate advisory is nudging, and it is a term that you have promoted previously in your career. Will nudging – gently pushing people into policy and behavior compliance – be part of your strategy?

You probably noticed from the ministerial declaration at the start of this government that I managed to have the term behavioral science included as one of the principles in forming the administration. I am proud to have injected this. If you want, “piece of me” into this declaration. There is a lot of room for nudging and behavioral science in senior recruitment. By creating a shortlist with some kind of implicit ranking of candidates. Even though it is a shortlist and the ministers are free to choose the number four name, it will be slightly more difficult for them because they then have to prove why they choose the number four and not the number one candidate. This is behaviorally informing a shortlist. There is room for behavioral science.

There even is a lot of room for nudging even in anti-corruption and we will integrate those aspects into our new strategy for 2026 to 2030, which we are currently working on. We are trying to change perceptions and social norms. There are perceptions that there is so much corruption, making [the administration] a basket case. But in the moment when you are starting to change that perception with facts and numbers, of how many are applying [for civil service positions] and how much trust there is, perceptions change. We have to work with scientific tools where we are changing perceptions – and when you change perceptions, you start changing behaviors.

As far as collaborations, there are your collaborations with other Lebanese ministries as well as collaborations with the international community or external partners. Half of the news items on your website highlight meetings with this or that ambassador or this or that international representative.  It is obvious that outreach is important for OMSAR. Within this network building and outreach, both internally and externally, what are your priorities?

In Lebanon, priorities are horizontal. I need to regain trust of three groups of stakeholders. My first group is citizens. I need to regain their trust. They kind of gave up on us, and I need to [build trust] inch by inch, using everything available to me: metrics, numbers, scientific methods, nudging, to change perceptions and change behavior. I also need to regain trust of the donor community because they gave up trusting us about five years ago. So many things happened during that time, we had the financial collapse, the corruption saga, the garbage saga, the thawra, the corona crisis, the port explosion. We had the total disintegration of government services. We saw [donor] support going straight into other NGOs or humanitarian relief but not into public administration. We are trying to regain this trust. And thirdly, we need to regain the trust of other ministries. And this is extremely important. OMSAR has been a kind of incubator and innovator that was carrying the torch of digital transformation in the government and was restructuring – and all of this collapsed five or six years ago. So ministries went it alone. Whoever managed to get a bit of funding, started a fragmented process, and this is extremely dangerous. But before I can tell them to stop doing this and to come and speak to us, I need my capacity. I am building my capacity and making sure that I am running ahead of them and do not slow them down, but I need to start putting some regulatory framework and standards in place so that they join this and that the different entities and ministries start speaking to one another and install systems that are interoperable. It is now my duty to regain the trust of the ministries. Otherwise, we are going to have a massive, chaotic, and fragmented projectization in services and in digital transformation in particular. This keeps me form sleeping because it would be an irreversible damage.

Your ministry by default has a mission that relates to issues of public entities and ministries, from gender equality in the administration to computerization and automation, skill development, and so your fingers should be in every ministry as far as those issues. Is that right?

Absolutely. But what we are doing now, is central planning and decentralized implementation. OMSAR will never be a big team and huge ministry, but I have to have a central planning function and team that does standard setting, that issues guidelines, and creates model ministries. There needs to be some handholding but not implementation. Implementation has to be decentralized, but in an orderly and organized fashion.

In the years of the pre-crisis phase, in 2018-19, there were ministries such as the Ministry of Investment and Technology or the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, both led by ministers of state. In 2025, we see roles in digital transformation being held by the new Ministry of Investment and Technology Affairs, as well as by the Ministry of Telecommunications. How does OMSAR collaborate with the latter? Will it be necessary to establish a ministry of AI and digital transformation?

The creation of a ministry for technology and AI is a fact. The question is how we can minimize overlap and create more synergies between both of us. The basic idea is that we need a regulator. Will this ministry be the regulator? Or will this ministry be creating another regulator? I have a conceptual problem if there is a ministry to create a regulator. We should be very thrifty or efficient in how many organizations we create. It looks like it is good for them to play a role as far as standard setting and technology advisory. But it should stop here. Any service reengineering and redesign should be closely linked to admin reform and stay under OMSAR. This makes sense and we have seen different examples for this.

You have different models and responsibilities with regard to digital transformation in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia, for example. There are different models so we have best to imagine the value chain. The value chain is thus: policy making, regulatory oversight, standard setting, and implementation and operations. And we are trying to make sure that this is clear. Implementation should stay within ministries, as for regulation, we should look at data regulation, cybersecurity, and many aspects of technology, the APIs and the interoperability. There is room for a technology regulator and there is room for the middle ware, the infrastructure that links all ministries through a seamless platform. However, the reengineering of services, is clearly an OMSAR mandate, the capacity building on digital services is clearly an OMSAR mandate, and so is the communication with citizens on the update of services,

And you are also in the driver’s seat as far as appointing the regulatory authorities that should ideally be independent from ministries?

And here I have now a suggestion. The Ministry of Telecommunications is involved in digital transformation where they look after data centers and have the connectivity. There is the Ministry of AI and Technology, there is OMSAR, and there is the Ministry of Industry that oversees Colibat for e-signatures, plus there is the Ministry of Justice that oversees some issues of signatures, and the Ministry of Finance that looks at payment gateways, and the central bank also is involved. What we need is some kind of a supreme council or higher institution, just like we have the higher privatization council. It is high time that in addition to the Ministry of Technology, the regulator, and OMSAR, we bring everybody together under the umbrella of one council headed by the prime minister. Something like this will be essential for coordination.

In the Saudi framework that you alluded to, it seems that the pivotal role of the crown prince is something that could not be easily replicated in Lebanon.

But we do have the executive function, so the prime minister should be playing the role.

From an ex officio perspective, definitely, but the permanence of leadership positions seems different between the Lebanese system and other regional government systems, with many questions about the best method. This brings us back to behavioral science and the question why humans behave as they do. Thinking about another behavioral case seen in the governance system of a global power, one that has lately been occupying the minds of people in most countries, is your ministry playing the role of a department of government efficiency? Are you Beirut Elon?

Am I DOGE? Not yet. But eventually we have to think of administrative efficiency and the fact that we have three pools [of people] at ministries and government: those who want to go, for whom we need to create a graceful exit; then there is the hard-working administration group of people who are re-skillable and we need to invest in them, and not only reskill them but also think of higher salaries. This becomes actually easy since we are no longer a bloated administration. And then there is the third pool that will come from outside and need an appropriate salary scale. This is something that has a DOGE element. So not yet but eventually we will be needing to fulfill a government efficiency role.

In closing, talking about meritocracy and sectarian limitations, I want to add that there are a few cases where we have recently presented shortlists for senior recruitment candidates to the Council of Ministers. These shortlists contain names of people from different sects – and this will be a premiere. Even if the candidate is chosen who is member of sect that also previously was grandfathering this role, it is a breakthrough that we had the courage of taking the shortlist to the Council of Ministers with names where not only the Catholic candidate for the Tele Liban chairmanship is included but also the Maronite. This is already taking things halfway to a meritocratic system. I am extremely happy that at least on a few positions, we have made recommendations [which diverged from the historic pattern].

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Editorial

Sending a clear message:

by Yasser Akkaoui
written by Yasser Akkaoui

Asymmetry of information is a corrupt politician’s best friend. Now, at the halfway point of the Aoun-Salam administration, trust in what was once heralded as an era of hope and change keeps eroding.

We would like to believe that the government is guided by a well-articulated strategy – one born of high-level coordination across ministries and anchored in a master plan that meets public expectations. Such a plan would address structural reforms, reconstruction, infrastructure development and, crucially, the recognition of government liability to depositors.

Yet the tone captured in this issue—weary, disappointed and skeptical—increasingly mirrors the criticisms we have voiced over past aministrations.

On June 19, the World Bank projected a 4.7 percent inflation-adjusted growth rate for Lebanon in 2025, signaling cautious optimism. But that outlook hinges largely on tourism and consumption, with limited capital inflows.

We are still waiting to hear of plans to enable investment in dysfunctional state-owned enterprises or to unlock the potential of promising companies through access to capital and markets. Isn’t investment the precursor to economic growth and prosperity?

We recognize the impact of ongoing military violations against our country and the need for asserting state authority. We are also convinced that the government can – and must – do better on other priorities: sovereignty also means defending our healthcare, pensions, food security, industries, energy, education and environment.

In all these regards, Lebanon’s private sector has once again demonstrated its capacity to lead. It is emerging as a key driver of economic recovery, offering a proactive alternative to stalled government reforms. While the government remains central to policy execution, it has grown increasingly oblivious to its role. Advocacy groups within the private sector are pushing for reforms in fiscal policy, administrative efficiency and social equity – efforts that complement international calls for structural change and align with World Bank recommendations. Meanwhile, the government continues to rely on an extractive model, taxing a weakened formal sector to balance its books, often at the expense of corporate sustainability, job creation and value generation.

Let us be clear: economies are not managed by ministries of finance and economy alone. They are collectively coordinated economic strategies and visions that optimize the productivity of national resources. Until that day arrives, the distance between government and society will continue to grow – and our fight for the Lebanon we want will go on.

Our commitment at Executive is to a Lebanon with a transparent and unified vision, a country that is unconditionally resolved to thrive.

To play a small part in working towards transparency and coordinated action, Executive Magazine will now be available in two additional languages – Arabic and French – allowing us to reach a broader audience and collaborate with a wider pool of journalistic talent.

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