Through conversations with Lebanese entrepreneurs, business owners, bankers, and politicians, I have had a number of eye-opening discussions into the challenges and opportunities faced by Lebanon’s SME ecosystem. Given the country’s long-standing tradition in financial services and its large banking sector, I believe fintech—with solutions such as peer-to-peer lending, machine learning to personalize insurance solutions,…
Currencies, bonds, gold, and emerging assets
The mundane reality of human wealth advisories is keeping investors in the purgatories of risk. Thus, it seems proper for the investor to track the evolutions of asset classes in a world where comprehensive wealth narratives begin with traditional asset classes—gold, bonds, and cash—and also venture into non-traditional stories of investing in infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and…
Questioning Lebanese real estate as an investment proposition
In the beginning, the land was empty and without borders, but then came people who settled on the land and built upon it. The people divided the land into plots large and small and invented rights of ownership to the land, all that was built on it, the water and resources beneath it, and the…
Reinvention of Lebanese equities and the coming capital market
Metaphorically, the asset class of equities, based on trading claims of minuscule ownership slices in listed enterprises, is the ballroom dance queen and king in the palace of financial markets. Historically—the joint stock company that is the precondition for the trading of shares being as young as four centuries—this asset class is a spring chicken…
Asset management in Lebanon
The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The problem of Lebanon in the current period of economic scarcity and political austerity is the proper administration of wealth in the interest of empowering society to…
The view from Lebanon’s education ministry
The Lebanese economy is changing. Our education system must follow suit. The Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE) is committed to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 Education, thereby committing to providing access to quality education for all children. Our work contributes to 12 other SDGs for 2030, including Goal 8…
Education and the 21st century
The 21st century will cause a rupture in the way we think, feel, behave, create, produce, and live. Fire took eons to start changing humanity—tools, a little less. The first agricultural revolution changed people’s lives over the course of 8,000 years. The first and second industrial revolutions took place within less than 150 years. The…
Providers search for lucrative coding bootcamp models
If anything about the future can be claimed as certain, it is this: The jobs of the future will be different from those of today, and jobs across various sectors will more heavily rely on skills such as coding and programming. This shift has already begun, and Lebanese entrepreneurs, such as the founders of SE…
Lebanon’s education system is failing students with special needs
Students with physical and cognitive disabilities in Lebanon are being put at a disadvantage by a system that, from the get-go, creates barriers—both physical and financial—toward an inclusive education. While there are signs that this could change in the future, current progress is slow, and on a structural level, the educational system in Lebanon continues…
Behind the Lebanese University strikes
My father returned to Lebanon in 1994, 10 years after the civil war forcibly exiled him to France. He thought that his PhD from Sorbonne University, coupled with extensive academic publications, would be sufficient for him to find a decent teaching job at the Lebanese University (LU). He soon realized the error in his assumption…