| Grant Profile: |
| Project Title: |
Rapid Social and Livelihoods Assessment in Lebanon |
| PCF/LICUS/SPF: |
PCF |
Status: |
Closed |
| File Number: |
339
| Region: |
MENA |
| Sector: |
Health and other social services |
Country: |
Lebanon |
| FY approved: |
2007 |
Grant Theme : |
Social dev/gender/inclusion |
| Keyword(s): |
Social/conflict analysis |
Approved Amount: |
$99,300.00 |
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Grant Recipient:
Ministry of Social Affairs |
Grant Purpose:
The objective of this project is to inform the strategic planning processes related to the post-conflict reconstruction effort after the war, during the Summer 2006. The project aims at identifying social policies and interventions to help those affected by the conflict, and the vulnerable segments of Lebanese society. The intended audience included the Government of Lebanon (GoL), the donor community, and Lebanese civil society.
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Grant Activities:
Component 1: Background Study
The objectives of the background study include:
(1) To summarise and analyse existing information and studies;
(2) To assess the institutional capacity of major social programmes and service providers to respond to the emergency.
The background study would be based upon literature review and interviews with key informants. Information should be sought from policy-makers, academics, UN agencies, World Bank, public and semi-public institutions (e.g. ministries, CDR, Association of Banks, Chamber of Commerce, etc.), international and local NGOs, and private institutions.
Component 2: Telephone survey
The objective of this component will be to quantify the prevalence of simple and measurable phenomena such as: injury, relocation, housing damage, income loss, loss of productive assets, lost access to services and utilities, reduced mobility.
Component 3: Preparation of Participatory Rapid Assessment (PRA).
This component would involve:
(1) Preparing, field testing and revising a PRA protocol.
The PRA protocol should complement open-ended questioning, probing and subjective ranking exercises to assist the aggregation of results.
(2) Identifying respondent clusters for the PRA.
It is envisaged that the respondent units would be both household representatives and focus groups (e.g. evacuee women, fisherfolk).
(3) Training enumerators and supervisors in implementation of the PRA protocol, by means of practice and demonstrations in the field.
Component 4: Execution of a Participatory Rapid Assessment
This component would consist of PRA interviews of approximately 500 households and/or focus groups, based upon the sampling frame developed above.
Component 5: Debriefing of enumerators, analysis and writing-up
The researchers will prepare a profile of the livelihoods condition of each identified vulnerable group, along with an analysis of their coping strategies and the potential role of public programmes to strengthen their recovery. The profiles will include narrative, qualitative description and quantified subject analysis. The team will also document the PRA methodology.
Component 6: Reporting and dissemination
The consultants’ report will cover the following topics:
(1) Context, objectives and outline of the study;
(2) Pre- and post-conflict social assessments and their findings (Component 1);
(3) Identification of vulnerable groups (Component 1);
(4) Assessment of public and non-governmental institutional capacity to respond to the emergency (Component 1);
(5) Profiles of vulnerable groups in post-conflict situation and coping and recovery strategies (Components 2 and 3);
(6) Priority public and private actions to assisting the coping and recovery of vulnerable groups (Components 1, 3, 4, 5);
(7) Recommendations for further study;
(8) Annexes : Study methodology; Results of telephone survey; Results of PRA.
The draft final report would be circulated to a wide array of stakeholders such as NGOs, CBOs, policy makers, line ministries, women’s groups, private sector representatives, municipalities, and civil society for input and comments. The final document should incorporate these stakeholder comments.
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Results:
(1) The study surprisingly found little evidence of permanent social transformation resulting from the conflict. In fact it claimed that social cohesion was enhanced by the conflict making people work together.
(2) One unrelated impact may be on MOSA, to move away from social service delivery to a more policy and analysis role.
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Lessons Learned:
Key challenges:
(1) The implementation was greatly delayed due to administrative and procedural reasons.
(2) The delay between grant approval and study launch meant the findings were not available, even in draft form, in the ESIA period as originally intended to be used in the post-war planning process. In other words, we ended with a post conflict assessment that was not rapid.
(3) The findings seemed to report more on the state of human development than on social/institutional impacts.
(4) The telephone survey was dropped as it proved impractical.
(5) Dissemination was limited by the lateness of completion.
(6) Political events overtook much of the interest and relevance.
General lessons learned:
(1) At the end of the grant, the executing agency MOSA writes:
(i) A major achievement was that grant / study provided qualitative data on the impact of war, whereas the major studies conducted were mostly surveys and provided quantitative indicators. It is a source of information that comes directly from the people themselves and hence gave it an added value over other similar initiatives taking place in the country.
(ii) The delay in starting due to administrative and procedural reason was a major drawback as it defeated the grant’s main objective; to conduct a rapid assessment and to provide policy makers with first hand information directly after the end of war on the impact of the attacks on the people. Administrative procedures should be taken into account for next time. As a follow up, a suggestion would be to conduct follow up visits to a small sample of the groups visited and study any progress or improvements in their conditions. There is a need to assess how many institutions or organizations (particularly government) benefited from this source of information in planning for their programs.
(2) The TTL argued that:
(i) It should be very clear that the proposal has the highest political priority and GOL readiness to sign;
(ii) The procurement capacity of recipient should be checked;
(iii) A template for the social assessment should be developed instead of every time starting from scratch with design, training, etc. |
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