The National Social Protection Strategy for Lebanon
Towards a Rights-based, Shock-responsive and Sustainable System
- English
- العربية
The Lebanese government has officially launched its National Social Protection Strategy. This strategy is the result of extensive efforts initiated in 2019 by Lebanon’s Inter-Ministerial Committee on Social Policy, led by the Ministry of Social Affairs, with funding from the European Union and the Government of the Netherlands and technical support from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF.
To know more about the strategy, please refer to the below briefs:
National Social Protection Strategy
The strategy serves as a comprehensive long-term vision that was developed based on a hybrid approach: a lifecycle lens which aims for a more human-centric perspective in addition to a pillar lens focusing on the legal and institutional angles where cohesion and coordination are strengthened across the overall system.
The aim of the social assistance pillar is to have a system which consists of streamlined and well-coordinated programs that provide direct income support to households to tackle rising vulnerability and income/food insecurity, promote socio-economic inclusion and life in dignity, as well as preserve human capital/ productivity.
The aim of this pillar is to have an integrated social insurance system that delivers adequate social insurance benefits to the entire working population in a financially sustainable manner.
The aim of the Social Welfare Pillar is to have an integrated system which ensures quality care services at the community level that foster family unity and preservation with a high degree of oversight and regulation from government.
The aim of the Labor Market Activation Pillar is reducing labor market imbalances and introducing supply side measures that can sustainably address unemployment and underemployment and ensure worker retention in the labor market amongst most vulnerable segments of the population.
The aim of the Social Health Protection component within the Financial Access to Basic Services Pillar is to have a unified system characterized by reduced fragmentation and adequate coverage to the entire population with the fundamental premise of health as a human right.
The aim of Financial Access to Education component is to ensure that households have financial access to education for all children. This implies that for households with school-age children, support provided under the other pillars such as social assistance or social insurance is not simply ‘cancelled out’ by high economic barriers to attending school or other learning opportunities.
At its heart, the Strategy will aim to achieve three core features:
- Universality as part of a human rights-based approach to social protection.
- Shock-responsiveness to improve the government’s capacity to respond to current and emerging crises.
- Financial sustainability to ensure continuity and anchor all initiatives in feasible implementation measures.
Relevant ministries, UN agencies, civil society organizations, including Organizations of People with Disabilities (OPDs), experts, and development partners, worked closely together to make this strategy a reality. Plans now need to be in place to ensure its proper implementation and to monitor and evaluate its progress.