The
social, economic, and financial context in Lebanon has severely deteriorated since
2019 and has worsened with the explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4,
2020.
In
this context, faced with the weakness of the central state, Lebanese local
authorities find themselves in the front line to meet the basic service needs
of their population while their budgets have lost 80% of their value.
The
SODEL project aims to strengthen Lebanese local authorities on issues of
citizen participation, communication, transparency, and evaluation of public
action necessary to build trust between the local authority and its
inhabitants, while addressing their urgent needs in the areas of social
inclusion, local development, and youth employability.
This
project is an opportunity for local authorities to position their power of
action, in order to address the societal transformations required to achieve,
in particular, the Sustainable Development Goals and to question the ways of
recovery and support of vulnerable people, in particular the youth.
This
project also allows structuring the development of public policies of the
Lebanese local authorities since they will have to constitute citizen
consultation units that will benefit from trainings and which will then intervene
in all the stages of the project, namely, the simplified diagnoses of
territory, the prioritization of the needs, the choice of the project to be
implemented, its setup, its implementation, and its evaluation. These
consultation units will constitute a core group on which the local authorities
can continue to rely after the implementation of the project, thus ensuring its
sustainability.
