Over the past few years, it has become common to hear many Lebanese retailers share their woes on dwindling sales as customers bypass the city’s luxury brand stores in a rush to the best sales or promotions.

While these retailers are not complaining without reason, it seems they have done well in adapting to the unstable situation, and have learned how to grow their businesses despite all the obstacles.

No tourists, no worries

In previous summers, tourists from the Gulf countries were seen strolling through the streets of Beirut with tens of shopping bags hanging from their arms. With their gradual decrease in number, starting from 2011, the retailers interviewed by Executive say they have gotten used to the loss of business caused by this, and are working to move past it.

Mher Atamian, managing director of Atamian, explains that while previously 10 to 15 percent of their sales in the luxury watches segment had come from Gulf tourists, they lost that market five years ago and no longer take it into account when calculating their profits annually, adapting instead to the local market and visiting expats.

Izzat Traboulsi, managing director of Fashion Trading Company, the wholesale agents of Hugo Boss in the Middle East, does not believe that Lebanon was a market heavily reliant on tourism, compared to Dubai, where Hugo Boss has outlets as well. He explained how the retail industry there suffered heavily when Russian and Chinese economies were not as solid as before and their nationals’ visits to Dubai dwindled. “Of course we can do much better, and we are losing the extra growth we could potentially [have] reached had [the situation] been normal. But what we are doing today is still good; the core business is doing well,” he says, placing Lebanon as their second best market in the region after the United Arab Emirates.

The local market and expats to the rescue

Tourists aside, retailers interviewed for this article say the biggest percentage of their clients were the Lebanese expats who came for summer vacation and the general Lebanese population. “We have always relied on our local Lebanese clients as the source of our continuing success; the Lebanese diaspora is a contributing element in our customer base as well,” says Jamil Rayess, general manager of Hamra Shopping & Trading Company (HST), which operates Grand Stores (GS) and several brand stores.

“We lost the tourists who used to shop in Lebanon and these constitute 20 percent of our sales, but this drop was between 2010 and 2011. Since then we have adapted to focus only on the local market and the Lebanese,” says Traboulsi. He goes on to explain that Lebanese expats generally have more disposable income due to the salaries they make abroad, which they often spend on shopping when they visit home.

The attack of the malls

Malls are highly popular among local Lebanese customers, and it is no surprise that all the retailers Executive spoke to have outlets in these large shopping centers.

Traboulsi says their Hugo Boss store in ABC Dbayeh – their first directly owned store in Lebanon which they took over from their franchise partner two years ago – is their number three performing store in the region in terms of turnover per square meter following their two outlets in Dubai Mall and Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, respectively. Atamian says their outlet in ABC Ashrafieh is their strongest point of sale for the high end market in Lebanon.

Atamian explains that the trend of malls started seven to eight years ago and has been on the rise ever since. “It seems that more and more people enjoy shopping experiences in the mall, where it is never hot or cold and you find entertainment for the kids and everything in one place,” he says.

Traboulsi sees this mix of medium and high end brands that exist in malls as a plus point for retailers like himself. “The trend of malls came to Lebanon and we should not underestimate their footfall. The mall has medium to high end brands, so the footfall gets created in the medium and extends to the luxury,” he explains, noting that people tend to buy low end luxury products, such as accessories, in a mall more than elsewhere.

Street Shopping

While the prevalence of malls has taken its toll on the more traditional retail areas such as shopping streets in Hamra or Ashrafieh, these conventional shops continue to survive. “Of course with the diversity existing in malls, their appeal is on the rise; nevertheless, some shopping streets have kept their status as [key retail] destinations and have flourished in parallel with the development of the ‘mall culture’,” says Rayess.

Atamian sees that those streets now appeal to a different nature of shoppers. “It doesn’t mean that the streets of Hamra or Zalka will die but the purchasing power of people who are going there dropped,” he explains, giving the example of the fact that international brand names in general are opening in malls rather than at street level.

Luxury in Downtown

The retailers that Executive spoke to are adamant that downtown Beirut as a shopping area is guaranteed to live on, despite their current struggles there, due to its concentration of high end and luxury brands. The overall business there, however, is still experiencing serious fluctuations in footfall and revenue.

Atamian says their luxury brand watches saw a drop of 15 percent in sales year-on-year when compared to 2014, and blames this on the global economic crisis and on scarce business in downtown Beirut.

“One of the major reasons [for that] would be because the downtown area, where all the luxury brands are centralized, saw a lot of closures and protests starting July [2015], which is our high season.” Atamian adds that the garbage crisis also caused the Lebanese expats in the country to cut their trips short.

Hugo Boss, which has seen a 12 percent growth from 2014, says the only hit they took in retail in Lebanon was in the downtown area, following the closures and protests. “The problem with Downtown is the footfall, although Lebanese generally love to go to Downtown. The area could have more footfall if they just leave it alone for a while and ensure it’s a safe place for Lebanese to come with no difficulty of access,” says Traboulsi. Such a statement may come across as somewhat hopeful, however, considering much of Downtown has been relatively empty in comparison to other commercial areas in recent years.

In fact, Atamian notes that even before August 2015, Downtown had not been performing as well as usual because of the decrease in tourists. Tourists indeed constituted the main clients in the downtown area, and with their decrease and the many empty shops they left in their wake, one wonders whether businesses there should start adopting the strategy of targeting the local population.    

However, a sign of retailers’ continuing faith in Downtown’s bounce back is their mentioning of new outlets opening in the area. Atamian plans to unveil a Baume & Mercier boutique in Downtown by December 2015; Traboulsi plans on opening a Hugo Boss flagship store on Allenby Street by March 2016; and HST has spoken of a 2,000 sqm GS flagship store to be launched in 2016.

A look back and a look ahead

Their luxury brands aside, Atamian says they were “quite successful” in maintaining their sales across their brands through their reliance on mid-market priced and fashion brand watches, which performed well in 2015.

According to Atamian, 2016 will be similar to 2015. “We do not foresee any major change up or down, and if we can continue to maintain our performance, then it’s okay for us,” he says.

Traboulsi says the process of shifting Boss’s business model from franchise to direct contact sales will be completed by 2016 and is meant to better control the brand and offer clients a “more premium” experience.

Traboulsi maintains a positive outlook, which he says is necessary for operating and growing in Lebanon. He advises retailers not to be discouraged by occasional poor sales and not to react by cutting down on qualified staff or product offerings, since that could cause loyal clients to shop elsewhere.

While the business climate remains generally tense for Lebanon’s retailers, it is a positive sign that they are still investing and expanding in the country, albeit conservatively, keeping faith that when the country bounces back, so will the profits.

The post Adaptation skills appeared first on Executive Magazine.

The cultural concept of the museum is ancient. It is named after the muses, daughters of personified memory as mother and the allfather deity, Zeus. From those distant days when the arch-poet Homer opened his narration of Odysseus’ heroism and victory with a plea to “the muse” to tell him of the “andra polytropon”, or man of many skills, people have dedicated museums as places for history, the arts, crafts and sciences in private, academic and public ownership, with or without entry fees, but generally with considerable investments.

Museums are expensive. When the National Museum of China re-opened its doors in 2011, state media reported that the renovation of the 200,000 square meter space – “said to be the world’s largest national museum” according to china.org.cn – cost $379 million. The Louvre, with 9.3 million visitors in 2014, the top benchmark of all museum statistics, said in its most recent annual report that its budgetary resources for 2014 were 204 million euros, of which 50 percent originated from state subsidies.

But does that mean that museums are cost centers for a society? Actually, that debate is going the other way. In recent years, the presentation of museums has included a growing emphasis on their economic contributions, for example a 2013 special report by The Economist, “Temples of Delight,” highlighted growth statistics on museum visits and the economic value of culture. Evaluation of the real economic contributions of museums adds a new and productive element to most democratic countries’ recurrent debates over public spending on culture and purported wastes of tax money on allegedly unproductive investments in museums, opera houses and subsidized cultural spaces in general.

Pro-museum numbers aplenty are now adorning the debate with the American Alliance of Museums claiming for example that “Governments that support the arts find that for every $1 invested in museums and other cultural organizations, $7 is returned in tax revenues.” Graphs from numbers portal statista.com show a constant customer demand for art museums in the United States, displaying annual visitor counts of over 30 million for 14 out of 15 12-month periods prior to any quarter since spring 2008. The numbers are stable and solid, with 32.3 million people visiting art museums in the US between beginning of summer 2014 and end of spring 2015.

As for the Louvre, the museum’s annual report stated that it has over 2,000 permanent employees, of which about 60 percent are hall supervisors. In implying the size of its contributions to the French tourism sector, the Louvre reported that 71 percent of its visitors were foreigners – including almost a million US citizens and 474,000 Chinese. Both groups are unlikely to be minimum-spending day trippers, even though, also interestingly, half of the museum’s visitors were below 30 years of age. More analytically, an academic paper published in 2009 by a professor of economics at the Sorbonne calculated the Louvre’s annual economic impact on France as ranging between 721 million and 1.16 billion euros in direct and indirect contributions. 

The Louvre, Paris, has an annual operating budget of over 200 million euros.

Those are impressive numbers. But truth be told there are reports showing that the cost-benefit numbers of the economy of culture are not nearly fully measured anywhere and for once it seems that Lebanon’s notorious absence of meaningful sector data – like on real estate demand for example – is no embarrassment in light of the information paucity on the cultural economy in developed countries.

Measurability of the economy of culture in the European Union is still in its infancy, conceded weighty studies in 2006 and again in 2012. “In relation to direct impact, existing statistical tools are not appropriate and available statistics are scarce. Statistical tools do not enable the cultural & creative sector to be captured properly,” found an oft-cited 2006 study on the cultural economy of Europe. And a 2012 report by the European Statistical System chimes, “The importance of culture within the scope of economic and social development is today unanimously recognized by the European Union. This increased perception of the major role to be played by culture in the achievement of the objectives of key European strategies such as Europe 2020 makes the absence of comparable data at the European level more striking to European institutions and the member states.”

The contributions to national wealth by the economy of culture are understood today to entail value creation through jobs and various other measurables but are also massively important indirect values-added. With human capital and social capital racing to the forefront of economic productivity resources, the presence of cultural assets in an economic hub city is a high-impact factor in attracting human capital. In this context it is interesting to note that Luxembourg, top of the developed world in per capita GDP, in 2014 had the highest ratio of cultural employment in the EU according to Eurostat, at 5.1 percent of all employed persons. Other high scorers, all above 3.7 percent of cultural employment, are the four Nordic countries, Switzerland and the Netherlands. When one of the world’s richest, services-driven and natural resource poor economies affords itself more cultural employment than any industrial neighbor, it bears asking if this correlation is a mere coincidence and if not, if the causality is one-sided or rather mutual, meaning that individual wealth creation and cultural employment support one another.

The National Museum of China, Beijing, cost $379 million to renovate

But there can be no doubt that museums are not just interesting for citizens of countries where per capita GDP is in the top 10 or 20 in the world. As China reopened its refurbished national museum almost four years ago, the state media advised, “As the museum is designed to receive just 30,000 attendants per day, visitors need to make reservations through hotlines, mobile phone services or the museum’s website.” The warning was appropriate. By 2013, the National Museum of China reported 7.5 million annual visitors, second only to the Louvre in the attendance rankings of museums worldwide.

The post The economies of cultural wealth appeared first on Executive Magazine.

Once again this November, the Lebanese autumn sun bathes the front of the Barakat Building in a warm, sleepy glow that accentuates its imperfections and old wounds just as they were inflicted more than a quarter century ago. But the old structure is very much awake. Just around the corner, workers navigate scaffolding on the heritage building’s side and along the new annex that together with the original nonagenarian structure is slated to form Beit Beirut, the house of memory.

A deceptively obvious allusion to the role as house of memory is the reference to memories of the Lebanese conflict, when the building was turned into a militia position overlooking one of the few crossing points of the Green Line that divided East from West between 1975 and 1990. That is why Beit Beirut will, on the exterior, be a memorial to the conflict years. “The façade is a finished façade that we want to maintain as witness of the war, showing Beirutis what they did to their city once upon a time. Learn from it,” pontificates Beirut mayor Bilal Hamad.

The restored building will, in reference to this past, include a sniper’s nest that controlled the nearby crossing between the two parts of the city. But Beit Beirut is not merely aiming to be a museum of the Lebanese war, as some citizens perceive based on the preserved scars and brokenness of the façade. “This will be a beautiful space for Beirut. My dream is that this will be the museum of memory and the first place to visit for anyone coming to see Lebanon,” Hamad says.

He tells Executive that his vision for Beit Beirut is to have it document and represent every part of the city’s past and every civilization that touched the territory, exhibiting official documents and collections of photographs – “every piece of paper from the history of Beirut.” Moreover, the museum shall be a place for collaborative studies of the civilizations that share its history, such as Canaanite, Phoenician and Aramean cultures, and a presentation hub through its auditorium and future programs.

The interior of Beit Beirut, the outside of which is shown in the main image

Yet currently there is a snag regarding Beit Beirut’s programming, beginning with the opening date. Delivery of the structure is overdue by a couple of years; however, this being Beirut and the museum a public sector project, only the opposite would have been a real surprise. What is nonetheless shocking, as per the state of affairs in November 2015, is that the building will be ready for handover by end of the year, Hamad says, but without the benefit of having a plan for either its inauguration or programming and operations.

He puts the blame for this failure at the door of the Beirut governorate, claiming that an agreement with a heritage consulting firm for devising the Beit Beirut program could not be formalized because the governor had not yet signed off on it. “I am almost finishing the construction and I don’t have a program on how to inaugurate the building and how to run the building. I have no idea. We will have concrete, stone and masonry and it will be an empty place because the governor is taking so much time to act on this matter,” Hamad laments.

Despite the Byzantine plays that seem to perpetuate themselves effortlessly in any Lebanese governance endeavor, it is worth talking about the positive sides of seeing this new museum completed, a public space in a city that is being increasingly overbuilt with monuments to private ownership. It is widely acknowledged that, once operational – hopefully within 2016 – Beit Beirut will be a cornerstone in the cultural identity of the Lebanese capital. It also deserves to be noted that this vestige of the Lebanese dream from the nascence of national statehood has every potential to be a pillar of the urban economy.

The road to hard cultural assets

The pillar in question is the economy of culture. This is something notoriously difficult to assess and almost impossible to quantify in any country (see culture economy). But worse for the economic potency of Lebanese culture is the impression of devaluation forced upon any serious observer by the recent years of careless treatment of many heritage-status deserving buildings and of fruitless protests against destruction of antique sites. Even the fact that activists saved Beit Beirut from demolition in the late 1990s is testimony to the sad truth that both the preservation and the sustainable exploitation of historic cultural assets in the city of Beirut have been dismal.

This impression of severe economic under-appreciation of cultural assets is reinforced just a few blocks up on Damascus Street, at the National Museum. The epitome of Lebanon’s modern history in its own right, having also stood on the Green Line, the National Museum recently recorded visitor numbers of fewer than 30,000 persons – per year. Some specialized history and archeology treasuries elsewhere in the Mediterranean count twice that number per week, or at least several hundred thousand visitors each year. These museums, moreover, do not have the same stories to tell as the Lebanese National Museum, and their collections are not necessarily as splendid.

Despite its appearance, Beit Beirut is nearly ready to open

The observation of underperforming culture is not to insinuate in any way that culture and Beirut have been disassociated in the past or present. It is to say that the continuity of arts and culture in the history of this speck of sometimes troubled Eastern Mediterranean beauty is all too often neglected when compared with popular emphases on the comparatively short but painful conflict periods that comprised the Lebanese Civil War. There are similar emphases on present-day incidents that have led to mistaken characterizations of Beirut as a place with isolated occurrences of beauty and art in an overall dominant state of turmoil.

In that context, it is good news that at least in a manner of perceptions, museum inaugurations in 2015 were beating other high-profile developments of spaces for public leisure hands down, winning out spectacularly over retail space launches and hotel openings, for example.

In early October 2015, it was the reopening of Beirut’s historically most important art space, Sursock Museum, that drew the city’s cultured class onto the lawn in front of the concrete structure’s neo-Moorish, palatial façade. Speeches were given, arias sung and champagne glasses raised in congratulations. The exercise seemed to resonate and another museum inauguration spectacle vied for attention merely two weeks later in the highly-touted opening of the Aïshti Foundation’s art exhibition space along the northern coastline of metro Beirut.   

Prospering plans

Plus, the cultural buzz of late was not only about museum openings. While caterers were still passing around the champagne flutes at the high-society laden Aïshti Foundation opening, laborers were already putting up the construction fence for an archeological excavation in preparation for a large new museum project in the center of the Lebanese capital, at the northern end of Martyrs’ Square. According to Mayor Hamad, work on the Beirut History Museum is finally starting at the location where Lebanon’s Phoenician, crusader and Ottoman past intersect with the Lebanese people’s current strife for true independence and proper governance.

At another downtown spot, currently a parking lot that briefly served as a drive-in open-air cinema at the end of the 1990s, yet another prestige museum should be on its way. This one is set to receive monetary help from the Sultanate of Oman (while Kuwait is the financing partner of the History Museum project). Its working title is House of Arts and Culture, or Dar Beirut. An initial architectural design contest for the project was staged over six years ago and winning results were announced in March 2009.

The snag in realizing the museum is that the Lebanese state did not come to an agreement with the site’s owner, Solidere, Hamad says. “At the time when Fouad Siniora was Lebanon’s prime minister, Oman committed to giving $20 million for the construction of a cultural center, but on the condition that the Lebanese government would provide the land,” he explains, adding that the negotiations did not reach fruition until the Beirut Municipality recently agreed to step in as buyer of the designated plot. According to Hamad, the municipality and the Ministry of Culture are now jointly progressing in negotiations with Solidere over the land acquisition as precondition for developing this cultural asset.   

In addition to the two publicly driven projects with foreign funding in central Beirut, a third major museum project is being pursued in a private sector/civil society initiative by an organization called APEAL, the Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon. For this project, a plot owned by the University of Saint Joseph has been earmarked in a very attractive location across from the National Museum of Lebanon. The idea is to create a museum for modern and contemporary art by the year 2020, and an architecture design competition for the project was launched in the fourth quarter of 2015.

The Sursock Museum has been renovated and opened to the public

APEAL would not provide Executive with budget projections and fundraising targets for either the architecture competition or the museum project itself but made it clear that it will rely on in-kind contributions and private sector donors. “As this initiative aims to develop a civic institution in Lebanon, and in the absence of public funding, APEAL is seeking in-kind contributions for various aspects of the project development,” explains Rita Nammour, the association’s president.

Besides seeking design entries where architects are willing to work under a formula in which “fees, overhead and direct staff will be compensated at a determined amount in lieu of standard fees and will reflect remuneration in line with a non-profit venture,” the project, according to Nammour, relies on the Lebanese cultural community, members of the diaspora and art patrons. “For a project as thoughtful and long-term in its approach as the museum we are building, it is absolutely essential to have such committed support from the diverse communities across Lebanon,” she says.

If one chooses to view the future of Beirut as cultural epitome in terms of economic assets, then these three projects alone suggest that the urban balance sheet of museums as property assets will increase multiple times over the coming four to seven years. Given the locations and potential dimensions of the Beirut History Museum, Dar Beirut and the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum projects, it is safe to expect that the urban investments into art and culture spaces will exceed the approximate $40 million-plus amounts that have been dedicated to the two recently opened spaces, Sursock and Aïshti Foundation, and to Beit Beirut.

The property values of the three recent museums cannot be appraised precisely because Sursock Museum was an existing public property and because the plot for Beit Beirut was purchased at, by today’s standards, a supreme bargain for $2.8 million back in 2002 before land prices in the Lebanese capital exploded. However, the invested amounts in public funding for the Sursock Museum expansion and Beit Beirut inside-out conversion were significant enough, at $12 million and $19.8 million according to Mayor Hamad. In the absence of clearer data from the owners, it would also be hazardous to guess how much of the $100 million investment into the Aïshti Foundation building exactly went into the museum space there, given that 90 percent of the property’s 40,000 square meters in built-up area are consumed by commercial retail and hospitality.

Constructing an economy of culture

Even with those caveats on the exact values of these three cultural assets at end 2015 and the notorious question marks over achievability of intended project delivery dates in Lebanon, it is a reasonable expectation that by the completion of the three aforementioned projects that are currently in the planning or pre-excavation phase, the six museums alone will five or ten years down the road represent cultural assets worth far north of $100 million.   

It should be noted that many museums on our Beirut cultural map have either been newly established since 2006 – e.g. the two AUB art museums, the Beirut Art Center, the Beirut Exhibition Center, the MIM mineral museum and the Robert Mouawad Private Museum – or were significantly restructured and upgraded in the past 10 years. When adding this to the tally of asset valuation, it appears that the metropolitan area is well on its way to being transformed from a museal void to becoming a museum hub.

Can these museums provide a boost to the Lebanese economy? The answer is a multi-layered one, but the immediate business and job generation opportunity will involve leisure explorers of culture. Over the past 25 years, concepts of cultural tourism development have been presenting themselves time and again as natural opportunities to Lebanon, but have been equally often relegated to economic insignificance by the political impossibility to organize safe and easy tours in the countries of the Fertile Crescent.

Due to the region’s latest laments, that impossibility is today greater than at any previous time in the past 25 years. However, a new alternative to combining cultural excursions to Lebanon with travels in the Levant could lie in a Mediterranean exploration paradigm. As Tourism Minister Michel Pharaon tells Executive, Lebanon sees an important future revenue driver in the Phoenician Route project of Mediterranean culture tourism that he says will be developed over the coming years.

“The Phoenician Route resembles the Silk Road and it is a project that is going to be taken care of directly by the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). It is culture that is turned into tourism products. It will take a few years, like the Silk Road which took almost ten years to develop, but it is on the map today,” Pharaon says. According to him, three countries will be steering the Phoenician Route, namely Spain, Tunisia and Lebanon, and the project is on the agenda for a meeting in May 2016 that the UNWTO’s Middle East committee, which is currently being chaired by Lebanon, will convene in Beirut.

Cultural tourism, which is as old as human curiosity to learn about civilizations other than one’s own, can certainly generate revenues for Lebanon and do so all the more thanks to the expansion of high-profile museum assets in Beirut and other potential developments under discussion with ministries and international conservation bodies, such as improved preservation and accessibility of Lebanon’s many diverse sites of archeological, historic and religious interest.

A broader angle yet

However, even a sweeping view of history and cultures from the Phoenician all the way to the Ottoman and French Mandate eras cannot and should not be taken as the whole perspective. Focusing solely on sites and witnesses of historic civilizations could be even counterproductive for realizing Lebanon’s potential from the perspective of an economy of culture. The simple reason for this is Lebanon’s extraordinary vitality in producing and hosting the arts today, which to ignore would mean crippling the growth of this economy.

What is deserving of real fascination in this context is not the growing number of museums or the value of their collections – immeasurable as they are – but their quality and diversity. A journey through the museums and art exhibition spaces of Beirut today confirms this with gusto: the arts, alongside trade skills and the will to survive, are the real constant of Lebanese identity.

From the prehistoric jars and bronze-age statuettes over the Hellenistic sarcophagi, early Christian mosaics and Islamic pottery, to the collections of paintings and photographs from the late 1800s onward up to 20th century jewelry, or the latest disruptive installations by young Lebanese and resident or visiting foreign artists and designers, one only has to keep her or his eyes open when wandering between its museums and the city to see that Beirut is not primarily filled with testimonies to stupid greed (although they too exist aplenty), but with evidence of both creative minds and collectors of all things beautiful. 

The creative treasures and the collected ones are becoming well represented in Beirut’s widening range of museums, from the archeology museum at the American University of Beirut and the National Museum to the contemporary art spaces in the comparatively cramped and unassuming but inspirational Beirut Art Center and the Aïshti Foundation’s magnificent four floors of perfectly designed exhibition area.

Beirut’s newly opened Aïshti Foundation

Perpetuating a creative environment and democratizing access to art is what previously no museum of major size and capacity has been able to provide in Beirut. This is what APEAL aims to produce through their planned Modern and Contemporary Art Museum. “The idea is to help Beirut in developing a museum-going culture not in an elite segment of the city or the society but through a museum that reaches out to the communities, with events tailored to the mission. We want it to be a kind of house of the people but we also are striving for it to be first rate, on a par with great museums of the world,” says Nora Boustany, board member of APEAL who describes herself as the organization’s philosophical or abstract mind when compared with the business expertise of the other board members.

According to Boustany, the museum will seek to showcase above all young Lebanese talent, alongside artists from the region, some of whom cannot hope to see museums being realized in their home countries.   

Pointing to the planned museum’s location that is highly accessible in a geographic as well as social sense from all urban and rural quarters of Lebanon, Boustany tells Executive that the new museum’s mission will include outreach events in rural areas such as the Chouf or the far north of Lebanon. ”We will try to help reel people into the idea of appreciating art. We are going to storm the local communities through visiting arrangements with elementary schools and secondary schools in the countryside and in the cities. And we are not talking about elites. Our target audience is everybody, art connoisseurs and the general public,” she emphasizes.

In its own brand of political awareness targets, the vision of APEAL extends to countering the culture of death that the terror organization ISIS is seeking to push. “We want to run with the young people in the opposite direction and we want the Lebanese and the Arab citizens to reconnect with their humanity, to have a much more serene, esthetic, balanced and spiritual vision of who they are and where they want to go,” she says.

Cognizant that the project in all its cultural aspirations will have to be economically viable, she points out that the museum and the museum-going culture that APEAL seeks to foster will generate jobs for many talented and university-trained young Lebanese who continue to lack opportunities to earn their living as culture workers in Beirut. The museum project itself is being prepared with the help of professionals who work on the budget and APEAL board members who are top consultants and help with strategizing. She concludes, “It will be a challenge, but the Lebanese have made so many institutions and corporations a success that I don’t see how a collaboration of local talents and knowhow and corporate muscle and backing cannot produce something that is economically viable.”

All that professional effort and enthusiasm may very well contribute to anchoring a socially rich and materially satisfying economy of culture in Lebanon and Beirut. But it is the owner of a dukkaneh at the top of Rue Monot who testifies to the tangible business potential underneath all the complicated babble. “I hope the museum opens soon,” he says, pointing at Beit Beirut across the narrow street. “It will be good for me.”

The post A city and its art appeared first on Executive Magazine.

While everyone in Lebanon — from taxi drivers to elected officials — “knows” the country’s largest waste manager is as dirty as the trash it collects, when pressed for proof, they have little to offer. Indeed, even questioning the “fact” that Sukleen — and, by extension, parent company Averda — is corrupt will likely get you dismissed as a know-nothing. Breaking the near absolute silence the company has maintained since it began operations in Lebanon in the early 1990s, Averda Chief Executive Officer Malek Sukkar opens up to Executive in a two-hour interview after facilitating tours of the company’s operations in Abu Dhabi and Lebanon. Questions about the private, family-founded company remain — most notably concerning their yearly profits — but months of investigation suggest there is more government negligence than corporate wrongdoing to the Averda story.

Bringing it back home

Maysarah Sukkar moved his engineering company, founded in 1968, to Saudi Arabia after the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. The work Sukkar secured in the kingdom included the operation and maintenance of two slaughterhouse waste incinerators in Mecca. “We had a lot of expertise in that specific technology of incineration,” Maysarah’s son Malek Sukkar says, recalling the company’s entry into the Lebanese market. That experience led the company to bid for a contract in post-war Lebanon to finish building and test-operate a trash incinerator then-located in Amrousiyeh. According to documentation provided by Averda, Sukkar Engineering beat France’s INOR (a company whose name has since changed to Inova) in a competitive bid to complete the project which INOR had taken on in the late 1980s. The contract’s value, Averda says, was $1.752 million. This was the proverbial foot in the door for Sukkar Engineering, which by 1994 adopted the name Averda and is best known in Lebanon under the brand names Sukleen and Sukomi.

Sukkar Engineering later bid to rehabilitate an existing but damaged waste incinerator in the Beirut neighborhood of Karantina. The company lost that contract, but in 1993 won two separate public tenders to operate the Amrousiyeh and Karantina incinerators, contracts valued at $1.35 million and $1.3 million per year, respectively. Operation, however, was short-lived. Angry residents of Amrousiyeh who did not want an incinerator in their “backyard” burned the plant down in 1996, and the Ministry of Environment — under then–Minister Akram Chehayeb — banned waste incineration in 1997. The end of incineration, however, did not mean a halt to publicly financed work for Averda in Lebanon. Sukleen had been collecting waste in the capital and its suburbs since 1994, and the closure of the incinerators brought Averda more business.

International supervision

Lebanon’s infrastructure in the 1990s was in shambles. In 1993, the World Bank loaned the country $175 million for what was supposed to be three years of “emergency reconstruction and rehabilitation” work. One of the loan’s many targets was developing waste management systems across the country. The solid waste component of the loan was later excised from the main project to become a project of its own with a lifespan extended until 2003. However, one of the only successes of these loans came early on, in 1994, when Sukleen won an international tender for waste collection in Beirut and its immediate suburbs, organized by the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) and overseen by the World Bank. According to company records Executive examined, Sukleen bid $14.99 per ton and was paid $3.6 million for collecting 240,000 tons of waste in the contract’s first year. Citing a report by the CDR — a government body that is part of the prime minister’s office and Averda’s contractual partner — Reinoud Leenders quotes the same figure for Sukleen’s first year of operations in his book, “Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon.” An Amsterdam-based researcher who worked for the International Crisis Group while based in Beirut from 2002–2005, Leenders’ book touches only briefly on the waste management sector. One detail he missed, however, is that the World Bank — according to project documents — paid the collection bill the first two years, and Sukleen’s contract stipulated that CDR provide the company with all equipment needed to do the job. Equipment provision only became the company’s responsibility in 1996, according to both Averda and the World Bank.

Contract augmentation

Sukleen’s original trash collection contract did not include street sweeping, according to Sukkar and Averda’s documentation (Executive was unable to independently verify this). The city, Sukkar recalls, looked like a dump especially because the previous trash collector in Beirut had been doing street sweeping. “CDR called us and said the political apparatus is not happy with the level of cleanliness in the city and said they want to cancel your contract. They told us we need to clean the city […] So we said ‘okay’ when they told us that they would augment the contract to include street sweeping.” Averda says that a government body with a World Bank representative conducted a price study and determined that the price offered by Sukleen was lower than what the city had been previously paying and, ultimately, CDR awarded the company sweeping works without a formal bid on February 20, 1995. The World Bank’s project descriptions do not go into this level of detail, and Executive failed to reach the country director for Lebanon at that time.

Awarding new work without a competitive bid, however, became a new modus operandi for the Lebanese government in handling waste management. Averda’s presentation of its contract history in Lebanon includes specific dates and government decisions for all the additional work Sukleen and Sukomi were given. Executive was unable to find these decisions in old copies of the “Official Gazette” — Lebanon’s mostly non-digital legislative registry. However, one of the most frequent critiques of Averda is that the company frequently received new work without tender. One example is the Sukleen service area. Originally, according to Averda, the service area was less than 100 square kilometers. The company writes, “At the request of the [since re-named] Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, CDR expanded the waste collection operational area from 100 [square kilometers] to 1,380 [square kilometers].” A chart Averda provided Executive with showing the increasing amounts of waste Sukleen was collecting suggests the expansion began in 1995, continued gradually until 1999 and, by 2014, included 266 municipalities generating slightly over 1.1 million tons of trash per year.

Emergency plan

During the war years, preserving the environment was not part of the waste management strategy for Beirut. The divided city had two open dumps — the Normandy dump in the West and the Bourj Hammoud dump in the East. By the time Sukleen began waste collection in 1994, Sukkar says the company was disposing of most of the trash it picked up in the Bourj Hammoud dump. The government repeatedly promised to close the dump, and in early 1997 finally approved an action plan. The plan included construction of new composting facilities, construction of two sanitary landfills and expansion of incineration and sorting capabilities at Amrousiyeh and Karantina. Excluding the landfill construction, Averda explains that in lieu of an international tender for work at the sites Sukomi was already operating, “CDR proposed to the Council of Ministers to subcontract the works to the existing contractor, Sukomi.” Incineration was later banned and the government ultimately only provided land for one composting plant, but Sukomi completed the works. Averda did not disclose the value of the construction contracts, nor did it disclose the value of the contract for building a sanitary landfill in Naameh, work awarded to Sukomi by CDR in 1997, according to Averda documents Executive reviewed.

No amount of sweeping has cleaned up Averda’s reputation in Lebanon

A 2001 report on the state of the environment in Lebanon offers a hint at the confused decision-making process that led to the construction of the Naameh sanitary landfill. The report says, “CDR commissioned Sukomi to design, build and operate the Naameh landfill (January 1998),” but notes that operation of the facility began in August 1997. Averda says CDR requested Sukomi to begin construction of Naameh in August 1997, with work actually starting in October. Averda adds that a contract for Naameh was not signed with CDR until January 19, 1998. Averda claims that, despite the lack of a tender, “CDR reviewed Sukomi’s technical and commercial offer,” adding that an unnamed CDR consultant “ensured that the prices are very well competitive with international norms.”

Following the emergency plan, according to Averda, the Council of Ministers combined Sukomi’s two waste treatment contracts (covering works done at the Amrousiyeh and Karantina plants — which includes composting done at the nearby Coral facility) into one contract, again without a competitive bid. This all means that by 1998, largely as a result of contracts awarded without competitive tender, Averda was collecting, treating and disposing of a significant portion of Lebanon’s waste.

The question of price

Given that Averda handles the full waste cycle (from collection to disposal) for hundreds of municipalities in Lebanon, quoting one, per-ton price is arguably counterproductive. As Sukkar explains, “it is a matrix. There are tens of people involved in calculating the costs.” He elaborates, “the issue of pricing is not voodoo. It is very simple. Our profits are generally in line with industry averages.” That last statement, of course, is the most disputed and one impossible to verify as the company does not share its profits in Lebanon.

That said, and contrary to Sukkar’s in-person answer that prices cannot be divulged due to a non-disclosure agreement that is part of Averda’s contracts, the company did share its prices with Executive. As noted earlier, the initial collection bid Sukleen offered was $14.99 per ton. However, Averda notes that the price was revised as per contractual agreement in 1995, reaching $22.66. By 2010, Averda reports that collection prices were $26.17 per ton in Beirut and its suburbs and $36.24 for further flung areas in the service zone. These prices are below the range offered by the World Bank in 2012 for average waste collection costs in a country with Lebanon’s gross national income per capita. The bank gives an estimated collection cost between $40 and $90.

According to an Averda spokeswoman, Sukomi was charging between $30 and $35 per ton to receive waste at the Naameh landfill, within the $25 to $65 range the World Bank estimates as average for a middle-income country. The World Bank did not provide an estimated cost for street sweeping. Averda says Sukleen is only being paid to sweep 1,375 kilometers per day at $21.125 per kilometer while it actually sweeps over 50 percent more, or 2,165 kilometers. Executive learned this after speaking with Sukkar, so was not able to ask why the company is not pushing to be paid in full. One can only assume the margins are loose enough to overlook the discrepancy.

Sukleen has been collecting waste in Lebanon since 1994

All told, Averda provided Executive with collection, sweeping and disposal prices — excluding the treatment contracts covering Amrousiyeh and Karantina. Based on Executive’s calculations, these three components come with a yearly price tag of $59 million. The true bill Averda presents CDR every year is, of course, higher because of the treatment contract, which an official involved in implementing a new waste management plan for Sukleen’s service area says totaled $50 million per year, bringing the total to around $109 million. While the local press often cites a single figure (i.e., $140 per ton, $160 per ton or $170 per ton) for what Sukleen “charges” the state, those figures appear to be an attempt to lump all of Sukleen and Sukomi’s services together. The figure is “high” simply because it covers the full waste lifecycle — collection, treatment and disposal.

While there are other waste management companies around the world that offer services covering the full waste lifecycle, it is more common for a company to focus on one or two areas — i.e. collection and street sweeping or treatment. Sukkar himself believes the fully integrated approach is not in Averda’s future as it looks to continue expansion beyond Lebanon. He wants to take the company public as soon as 2017, which would include bringing in what he calls a “professional CEO.” Sukkar says, “When the professional CEO comes in, he will look at [our treatment and disposal operations] and say, ‘This is not core.’ Because we shouldn’t be developing composting systems. We shouldn’t be developing sorting systems. […] He might well divest.”

End of an era?

When CDR put out international tenders for new waste management contracts in early 2015, Averda did not bid. Sukkar says that was because the contracts required the winners to find land for treatment facilities and sanitary landfills — long a problem in Lebanon as no one wants to live near a waste center. If and when a new plan is put into place, Sukleen and Sukomi will leave Lebanon. The issue of finding land, however, is integral to Sukomi’s early history in this country. The emergency plan from 1997 called for more than what was ultimately delivered as the state never provided land for facilities it said it wanted built. Indeed, Sukkar and Averda’s documentation have no shortage of complaints about the client — CDR — either making promises it does not follow through on (such as providing land) or otherwise making life difficult for Sukleen and Sukomi. He denies the company ever paid bribes in exchange for contracts and denies that leading politicians are shareholders (a fact confirmed by documents Executive obtained from the commercial registry). The one question he dodged, however, is why the company continued working in Lebanon despite being at the whims of a fickle and often unresponsive client.

Sukkar also refused to provide the company’s financial statements, making it impossible for Executive to verify his claim that Sukleen and Sukomi’s profit margins in Lebanon are in line with industry averages. Critics often claim that Averda’s Lebanon operations result in profit margins of 35 percent or more. Whether that’s true or not, the state is about to see its trash management bill significantly increase should a December 21 cabinet decision to export waste go into effect. Agriculture Minister Akram Chehayeb told the press that exporting the waste will come with a total price tag of $212 per ton — well above the rumored lump sum rates Sukleen and Sukomi are paid. He also mysteriously said that for 18 months of export, the total bill will come to $200 million. However, given that Sukleen’s service area generates an average of 3,000 tons of garbage per day, at $212 per ton, the $200 million will be spent in around 10 and a half months. The full 18 months would cost nearly $350 million. And, once again, the government will be awarding the trash contracts without competitive bidding.

The post Dissecting a waste empire appeared first on Executive Magazine.

We are being governed incompetently. 2015 proved that. Not only did the government’s handling of waste management allow one of the country’s worst environmental disasters to unfold, but it is replicating bad decisions it made nearly 20 years ago. In 1997, the cabinet gave one local company a monopoly on most of the nation’s waste without a competitive tender. As 2015 came to a close, the cabinet was set to simply split that monopoly between two international firms, again without a competitive tender. But for double the price. Worse, the alleged will to let municipalities handle their own garbage announced in September 2015 has yet to translate into action, meaning that if this temporary solution is truly temporary, rotting trash on the streets will be back in fashion for summer 2017.

It’s important to remember that the great “trash crisis” of 2015 actually started with a government decision in early 2014 to close the nation’s largest sanitary landfill. While there was nothing wrong with the decision to shutter the landfill, the blunders soon began piling up like so many uncollected bags of garbage. First and foremost, a ministerial committee tasked in early 2014 with finding a replacement for the Naameh landfill failed spectacularly. The plan this committee eventually settled on consisted of dividing the country into six service zones and tendering waste management in those zones to private companies. Bidding did not open until late in the first quarter of 2015, meaning that even if the tenders were successful, winning companies could not have had replacements for Naameh constructed before the landfill closed. Further, the plan once again would have given one contractor (admittedly a consortia of local and international companies) in each zone full control of waste management, which is not standard international practice and arguably the main grievance against Averda, parent company of waste managers Sukleen and Sukomi.

On top of that, the tender conditions were outrageous. The contracts were slated to last seven years, yet winners were expected to: 1) secure land on which to build waste management facilities; 2) build and operate those facilities; and 3) decrease landfilling from around 80 percent of the total waste stream to 40 percent in the first three years and to 25 percent thereafter. Land in Lebanon is expensive. Capital expenditure on technologies needed to decrease landfilling can cost millions, and resident opposition to waste management facilities “in my backyard” is high. Every private sector player Executive spoke to about the tenders — including those who ultimately submitted offers — said the tenders seemed designed to fail. Executive has not been able to discern exactly how the tender conditions were formulated, but Parliament should do its job and question all involved in an open, televised session. The legislature has this authority, as evidenced by an October committee hearing the press was asked to leave when MPs nearly came to blows.

When the tender winners were finally announced in August — over one month after Naameh closed and trash piles and open burning were common — the contracts were immediately cancelled because of supposedly high costs. As Executive noted at the time, proper waste management is not cheap, and several local politicians are well aware of that. The fall-back plan, formulated in a matter of days and approved by the cabinet in September, had two components: sanitary landfilling for 18 months and devolution of waste management responsibilities to the municipalities. The second part was the more important, as it was envisioned to be long-term and sustainable. Flawed as the reasoning may have been, the idea called for cities and villages to work together, establishing their own service zones and choosing local sites for waste treatment and disposal. While the public generally seems to have no problem littering or despoiling this nation’s natural beauty with festering open trash heaps, the Lebanese have traditionally opposed modern waste management facilities being built anywhere near their homes. The government was supposed to create a committee to build capacities among municipal leaders, getting them ready to handle their own trash — with or without private sector participation. By March 2017, the entirety of Lebanon should have had plans approved, contracts signed and all needed waste management facilities built and ready for operation to accommodate the full devolution of responsibility for this most basic service. While the temporary landfilling component of the plan hit the expected brick wall of public opposition, authorities have done absolutely nothing to prepare for full municipal takeover of waste management. If even one minister who approved the plan took it seriously, he or she should have loudly and frequently called for action on the long-term component. Instead, time has been much better spent bickering over temporary sanitary landfill sites.

The most confusing part of this saga, however, is the seemingly final chapter. At time of writing, the government says it wants to export the nation’s waste for 18 months at a cost of $212 per ton. Given an average waste generation rate of 3,000 tons per day in the areas that incumbents Sukleen and Sukomi have been servicing, the total bill will be nearly $350 million — more than double the estimated $165 million for 18 months of waste management services the government would have paid Averda, Sukleen and Sukomi’s parent company. And awarding these new contracts without public discussion or competitive bidding is simply a repeat of the worst sin the government committed in dealing with Averda these past two decades.

Executive believes in private enterprise and responsibly earned profit, so we’ve been paying special attention to the so-called “waste file” and have dug deep into allegations of corruption levied against the private company that has been cleaning up after most of us since 1994. We were able to completely debunk some of the accusations against Averda (namely that politicians hold shares in the company and that its prices are extravagant). We could not disprove some of the other allegations against the company (namely that Averda paid bribes to get work, shared profits with the political elite and/or earned profit margins in excess of 30 percent). What is absolutely clear, however, is that Averda’s workload, and thus its revenues, expanded repeatedly without competitive bidding. The tendering process, however, is the government’s responsibility, not the contractor’s.

In dealing with Averda, successive governments seem to have viewed it as the path of least resistance. For example, in 1997 when the government faced a self-imposed deadline to close the open dump in Bourj Hammoud, the cabinet approved an ambitious emergency plan that envisioned the construction of waste sorting and composting facilities as well as a sanitary landfill in around 18 months. The state simply gave the work to Averda instead of going to tender. This is a bad pattern. We should be ashamed of it, not repeating it.

And, while it is uncommon for one company to be offering the full spread of waste management services, what the state pays Averda is not higher than in other countries with Lebanon’s income level for the same range of services. Doubling that cost with no guaranteed long-term benefit, however, is ludicrous and proof our leaders are happy to make incompetent decisions. Everyone loves to hate Averda, but the company did not create the situation in which it works. It should not be demonized for doing its job. That said, more transparency in waste management — as well as all state financed contracts — is long overdue.

Parliament needs to assert itself. If the government awards no-bid contracts, lawmakers should demand answers. In public. The legislature is supposedly the cabinet’s watchdog, and the “waste file” demands immediate action for the greater public good.

And years of accusations against Averda should teach us a few things. Parliament should also develop listing requirements for any company that wins state work of a significant value or duration. The exact requirements are open to debate, but the bottom line is that when public money gets spent, those ultimately footing the bill have the right to a basic level of knowledge and access to information.

The post Recycling history appeared first on Executive Magazine.

The magazine proposes a few resolutions for 2016. And we’re starting the year by practicing them. First, we call on the best and brightest Lebanese minds to seize the potentially lucrative opportunities that the Paris Agreement on climate change will afford. This is why we’ve put climate change on our cover.

Our second, and most important, resolution is that 2016 will be our year of business ethics. There’s no better place to start than with the worst disaster this country has seen in recent memory: the (mis)handling of waste management. We take an in-depth look at a local company given far more opportunity than international best practice suggests it should have had. We’re setting the stage for a year in which we will take a very hard look at business ethics in this law-ignoring country.

Milton Friedman wrote that a company’s top brass — be they a board of directors or a small number of executives — has only one objective: make more profit year-on-year for the benefit of the company’s most important stakeholder, its shareholders. Of course, the company must obey the law, conduct business in a responsible manner and treat its employees respectfully and well. As we publish our months-long investigation into Averda, parent company of waste managers Sukleen and Sukomi, what we’ve found is plenty of government malpractice. Yet for every rumor we chased, we could not substantiate illegal behavior on the company’s part. Even the notion that the company only received contracts because of its founder’s religion or alleged ties to the late Rafik Hariri is undermined by the fact that each time Sukleen or Sukomi were given a no-bid contract, the entire cabinet approved. The conspiracy to divide the pie is one all of our politicians are in on.

Our system is so broken and the laws and regulations we have on the books are so poorly enforced that it looks perfectly legal for a company to be given not only a monopoly on waste management, but years and years of taxpayer-financed work without having bid on a contract in more than 20 years. In fact, the Shura Council in 2001 gave Averda’s contracting in Lebanon a legal seal of approval. It’s bewildering. No-bid contracts might be legal in Lebanon, but they are neither reflective of international best practice nor of the Lebanon we want to see.

The summer of 2015 saw protests we hoped would achieve more. We published a manifesto to help inform this country’s citizens because we’ve spent nearly 20 years pointing out what’s wrong in Lebanon and what needs to be done to right it. In 2016, you can expect us to name and shame both corporates and government officials. And we won’t be using Lebanese standards. Like the manifesto, our coverage this year is meant to help activists and pressure groups know who is doing wrong and how and what can be done better. We want an inclusive economic system, and the most effective way to get there is by promoting best in class corporate behavior. We’re on a mission, so keep reading.

The post Resolutions for 2016 appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

ReAble

Industry: Health care and ICT

Product: ReAble wallet mobile app

Product launch: 2015

Established: 2015

Employees: 3

Founders: Paul Saifi and Emile Sawaya

When Emile Sawaya’s younger brother was diagnosed with autism seven years ago, he became aware that the market offered very limited technological tools for independence for those with cognitive difficulties. Fast forward to 2015, Sawaya and his blind co-founder, Paul Saifi, felt that the market was worthy of exploration and wanted to develop tools which would give individuals, such as Sawaya’s brother, the ability to gain some independence from caregivers. They identified a gap in the market, which offered only expensive technological tools catering for a Western market.

Their main product is the ‘ReAble wallet’ that focuses on money management and financial transactions for people with autism and eventually for a broader range of people with special needs. Sawaya’s main motivation is that many people with autism have difficulties with the concept of understanding value and the premise of value exchange, especially with monetary difference that is owed to them after a transaction. The ‘wallet’ is an app which can be loaded onto any Android smartphone, and works through optical character recognition (OCR). It allows the user to register the bills they have in their possession, and subsequently scan receipts into the app, which can register the time, date and value of purchases. The app then informs the user of the correct change they should receive and affords them budgeting capabilities throughout a time period. The caregiver has a corresponding app with push notifications informing them of the user’s transactions. This bridges the gap between a concerned caregiver and an individual with autism, while simultaneously offering them a degree of freedom and independence. A prototype of the application, which works on Android, is scheduled to be unveiled at the Banque du Liban Accelerate conference in December 2015.

The application was designed with therapists – here in Lebanon and in Canada, the United Arab Emirates and the United States – so that the application (in terms of color, buttons and interfaces) was appealing without being distracting to those with autism. There are current plans to incorporate an element of artificial intelligence to identify the financial habits of users, and deduce whether they are harmful (e.g. overspending). ReAble is currently working with two institutions in Canada and two in Lebanon, Assafina and CARE, Consultant Advocacy for Remedial Education.

To monetize the product, the business model will be based on a subscription plan and allow the user to buy the application for $5 per month, an estimate at the end of 2015. This subscription plan can be rolled out to care centers, which would need extra tools to manage the app, from a dashboard package to enterprise, services and maintenance. Their target market is teenagers and adults who have mid-to-high functioning autism, and Sawaya says this is a market of 35 million based on WHO statistics worldwide and not limited to the MENA region.

Initial tests would support the enthusiasm Sawaya has for this project. Within 48 hours of launching applications, they received interest from 100 beta testers, who Sawaya explains are individuals with vested interest in the product, and are working to extend the project to remote therapy access through an online platform hub for people with disabilities, and roll the product out to iOS and Windows Mobile platforms. With their intentions to stay headquartered in Lebanon, they are currently looking to recruit a programmer in the country and wish to gather as much technological talent as possible, coupled, eventually, with their own in-house therapists.

The post Guarding against fraud appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

Sensio AIR

Industry: Health care and ICT

Product: Allergen and particle tracker

Product launch: January 2016

Established: 2015

Employees: 6

Founders: Cyrille Najjar and Eve Tamraz

Sensio AIR is the creation of Cyrille Najjar and neuroscientist Eve Tamraz, who founded the White Lab in early 2015 and have recently relocated to London with the second phase of the UK Lebanon Tech Hub acceleration program. Their product centers around a piece of hardware which detects “allergens like pollen, acarids and mold as well as harmful gasses” as quoted by the company, and feeds data on the quality of the air back to an app on a mobile device for analysis and notification. The patent for their device is filed in both the UK and Lebanon, which they have identified as key parts to their main sales market. Their idea was borne out of the fact that both cofounders suffered from allergies, but had limited ability to continuously monitor the quality of the air.

The device is similar to a smoke detector in installation and appearance and allows for quantitative and qualitative analysis of the quality of the air, especially that within the home. Sensio AIR has eyed Europe as a first main market in light of continuous reform to EU air quality directives, with the European Commission quoting air pollution as one of their “main environmental policy concerns since 1970”. Sensio AIR has identified 21 million people with respiratory problems in the UK alone, based on a 2010 report from Mintel, a global market research and insight firm, along with 12 million who are allergic to their own homes. The device therefore “detects everything that is in the air,” claims Najjar, who explains that it can observe particles down to a minimum of a micrometer, and often identify what the particle is. The smart allergen monitor has piqued interest among professionals and has already won two competitions: the Harvard Startup Pitch Competition in Boston and the Instituto de Empreza International Venture Day in Paris. Beta testing has been launched and electronics production is based in the UK, and Tamraz and Najjar claim that their product is more sensitive due to the accuracy of their hardware than any other detector on the market today. There are two versions, a bespoke and a business-to-business model. Their main unique selling point is that the device detects more than one presence within the air (e.g. both pollen and carbon monoxide), unlike a single feature device like a carbon monoxide detector. It also does not operate purely on ‘threshold technology’; detectors which will only sound an alarm when a certain level of a pathogen or toxic fume is reached. The Sensio AIR monitors the content and levels continuously and sends data to the user.

Najjar and Tamraz, along with their other two colleagues, eye selling 5,000 units in London, 1,000 in Paris and 200 in Beirut as a starter, and the company breaks even after the selling of 2,200 units, with Najjar confident that they will begin making profit after one year of sales. They will offer a variety of packages to accompany the units; an enterprise solution where the device is bought and a monthly fee is paid, a corporate 3G package, and a personal package which includes a one-off payment and installment of a wifi device for $299. Little boosters can also be installed in a separate room for small additional costs. The data on the units will be analyzed, and allergic homeowners can use the data in a health care perspective. Tamraz estimates that this will corroborate outbreaks with specific detected allergens, thus allowing for a diagnosis based on the principles of deduction rather than, for example, a test which pricks the skin with a needle containing a small amount of the allergen. They will launch the product during allergy season in March 2016, with the back end development based in Lebanon and the main sales market in London, though they hope to eventually have equal sales and demand here and eye the MENA region as a strong expansion plan because of frequent sandstorms. In commenting on the efficacy of their device, Najjar explains the testing they did on the quality of the air in Lebanon in summer 2015; “You don’t want to know, the results were so bad. We need a strainer, not a detector. We need to strain the air with a filter.”

The post The air that we breathe appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

Teens Who Code

Industry: Education

Product: Coding classes

Product launch: 2014

Established: 2014

Employees: Recruitment on project basis

Founders: Nour Atrissi and Ziad Alameh

Teens Who Code is the brainchild of co-founders Nour Atrissi and Ziad Alameh, who met in AltCity and decided to form a startup in October 2014 dedicated to teaching young adults how to computer program in different languages in 2014. Aimed at improving computer literacy amongst teenagers, Teens Who Code offers courses and private sessions to individuals in a number of different areas, from web development and Raspberry Pi classes, to android and iOS development. Their reasoning for targeting the youth is that programming skills are, like a language, often absorbed faster by a younger mind and can subsequently shape future career paths. Their board of advisors also boasts familiar faces, such as David Munir Nabti, CEO of AltCity, and Nicolas Sehnaoui, former minister of telecommunications.

Their business model is currently centered around developing curriculum for bootcamps – 10 week programs which Atrissi explains are in direct response to market demand – which will be rolled out in February, and which she feels enable students to improve in the most efficient manner. In addition, next year they will start targeting schools and offering after school classes in addition to separate bootcamps. A pull factor included on their website is the offer of a free hour-long coding session for new sign-ups with Alameh. Several of their graduates go on to receive job offers, and Atrissi explains that the AUB undergraduate who manages the TEDxAUB website graduated from their program. Teens Who Code has been self-financed over the past year, and has collaborated with AltCity to use their office space when offering large classes. Teens Who Code will seek external funding over the course of 2016 in a bid to expand across local and regional markets, while approaching schools to advertise and advocate their project in an educational setting. Having physical teachers on the ground encourages and pressurizes students to complete their programs, which gives Teens Who Code a competitive edge over massive open online courses (MOOCs) run by educational giants like Coursera, which have a four percent completion rate compared to Teens Who Code’s 90 percent completion rate. Aside from online platforms, Atrissi stresses that there are no competitors who specifically teach coding to teenagers in Lebanon.

Atrissi and Alameh are looking to recruit coding teachers for their different courses, which retail at $250 for a two month bi-weekly iOS development course and set a limit of 10-12 students per class. While there are no limitations on previous experience, Teens Who Code try to filter students into classes according to their coding history. As  the model for her startup is scalable to the entire region; offering licences of the curriculum and content to other cities within the Arab world is her current expansion plan, which she claims avoids the costs of having their own physical facilities and tutors. Teens Who Code also identifies quality control as a key element of their expansion plan, with key deliverables for each student within their courses. Although Atrissi does not reveal exact financial details, the project is currently self-funded and equity is equally split between her and Alameh. Immediate future plans will be concentrated in Lebanon before they seek external investment of $50,000 to roll the model out to the wider region. 

The post School of code appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

Modeo

Industry: Furniture and design

Product: Modular assembly furniture

Product launch: 2016

Established: 2015

Employees: 2

Founders: Emile Arayes and Aline Gemayel

Modeo is a young startup launched in February 2015 which caters to individuals who wish to try their hand at furniture design. Formed by two working architects, Emile Arayes and Aline Gemayel, who were frustrated by the lack of low-budget  assembly furniture, Modeo allows users to build custom plastic furniture through a mobile app interface, and uses geometric “interlocking modular parts” to assemble a range of pieces. The design can be viewed in a virtual interface before ordering, with sizing and color options, as either a 2D designed image or a 3D projection. The pieces are then delivered to the user’s door, and assembled in a similar IKEA-style flat-pack method. Having come second in the Bader Startup Challenge in May 2015, the company is now enrolled in the Speed@BDD acceleration program and developing its business plan and strategy, as well as improving the design of its final product.

Arayes and Gemayel are currently recruiting a business strategy partner who will monitor the manufacturing and distribution of the Modeo system and furniture product. They have guidelines to be environmentally friendly, and are constructing lightweight furniture pieces which can be reused and reassembled post initial construction. Their target is the mid-to-low end range market of furniture users, and they are using low-cost recyclable plastic material through the ‘lean startup model’ – iterating design of the product and improving prototypes through the needs of early customers.

Dealing with mobile apps, storage and distribution means that the company will need to recruit local talent, along with using local 3D printers to demonstrate the concept to investors. Plans for mass manufacturing are not yet finalized, but local 3D printing is helping Modeo to improve their model before they move to plastic injection models formed from aluminium molds.

Though their business plan is still going through stages of development, they stress that main sales will come through their app, and do not intend to host their furniture in showrooms, but only in exhibitions as a marketing ploy. Moneyback guarantees are also in place in their business strategy, should their furniture not satisfy individuals, which overcomes the initial ‘trust’ barrier. Their target client base are those who would use similar assembled furniture lines, such as IKEA which comes from outside of the region, yet they stress that their advantage over such manufacturers and unique selling point is the ability to both assemble and disassemble pieces easily, enabling users to reuse and repack the furniture when moving. Their projections estimate a sale of 16,000 average-size units in the first year of operations, generating roughly $1 million in revenue.

The post Some assembly required appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

Urbacraft

Industry: Consumer and retail

Product: Construction toy and educational kit

Product launch: 2014

Established: 2014

Employees: 1

Founders: Sabine de Maussion and Ayssar Arida

Sabine de Maussion and Ayssar Arida developed urbacraft in 2014 after identifying a gap in the toy industry for locally appropriate toys. Their main product is a hybrid “customizable building set” which allows individuals of all ages to form buildings out of modular plastic pieces – ‘urbs’ – and other printable materials and elements – ‘kits’ – such as a cardboard façade, which can be added and ‘hacked’ (e.g. ‘colored in’) by the user. Unlike other composite toy creators, urbacraft’s philosophy is rooted in open source construction, and allows the user to add parts they designed themselves. Their product for the recently opened Sursock Museum store includes a card façade with the building’s recognizable windows. Pieces are compatible with other toys, and parts or self-designed elements can be printed using either a normal or 3D printer. The company functions as a hybrid software-production company, since individuals who use the product can upload designs of façades or other parts to the urbacraft community, which in turn can be downloaded by other users and ranked in popularity.

In terms of local business, urbacraft aims to have small regional distribution centers for the plastic parts and encourage local economies by having children from the age of eight upwards print downloaded plans in local printing offices. This vision ties in with their aim to reduce their carbon footprint by not manufacturing in China, and figuring out distribution channels to those without access to a 3D printer, thus enabling localized manufacturing. In terms of expansion, Arida is keen to recruit Lebanese talent and hopes for a team of around 40 to 50 people within the first four years. “Two of our main needs for jobs are designers and product managers. Beirut is a fantastic place for both and the economics of Beirut makes it much easier and cheaper than to hire elsewhere. We will be tapping into the design, architecture and creativity that is already there – an extraordinary resource,” he says. The company also aims to continue running operations from its main offices in Beirut for the foreseeable future, hiring for sales and social media.

urbacraft has identified that the world’s largest consumers of toys over the next few years will come from emerging markets, and in particular the construction toy market has seen 35 percent year-on-year demand growth. While children are the main target market, Arida stresses the importance of such a model for other parties. “We’ve seen so much interest from adults like architects needing to prototype buildings or corporations using them for workshops for building design,” he says. Professionals and corporations are a secondary target market for urbacraft, along with educational institutions where the startup wants to expand sales into open-ended learning systems as educational toys.

Going forward, urbacraft is looking to raise between $500,000 and $1 million in seed funding over the next year, and is pitching to investors interested in consumer goods. It is currently the only non-American company enrolled in the XRC Labs accelerator in New York, which is a joint program between the Kurt Salmon global management and strategy consulting firm and the Parsons School of Design, also based in New York. The accelerator has taken a 6 percent equity slice for an undisclosed investment and provided services, and urbacraft has already been through Phase 1 of the UK Lebanon Tech Hub acceleration program.

The post Building blocks appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

TickleMyBrain

Industry: Recruitment

Product: Resume and presentation services

Product launch: 2012

Established: 2012

Employees: 4

Founder: Tara Nehme

Tara Nehme, the Lebanese-Canadian founder of TickleMyBrain (TMB), first noticed that people’s resumes needed assistance when a friend asked her to check their CV at the last moment before applying for a job in Dubai. What started as a small career advice blog in 2012 has evolved into an online platform dedicated to improving the presentation of users’ credentials. TMB offers services for improving documents (such as resumes and various applications) uploaded to their website for a minimal fee of $99 for the basic package, and $5,000 for a business plan.

Nehme identified that many candidates suffered at the application stage of careers due to poor presentation of otherwise good credentials. Akin to coaching for a pitch to an investor, TMB offers guidance to clients wishing to give the best first impression possible, without deceiving potential employers by carefully monitoring the content management of a portfolio. TMB’s main business is selling the overhaul of resumes and cover letters, but they offer other services as well to meet premium writing requests of clients. Until now, the business has operated through a freelance writing team.

Their business model matches freelance writers with clients who need editing and language services, at a 30:70 revenue split to TMB and the writers respectively, the latter of whom are heavily vetted by the business. Their future model centers around scaling the business to include a ‘tiered system’, offering express services with a fast turnaround alongside the current TMB system, as Nehme often has urgent requests. The value proposition of this would be the speed of writing turnaround, which is how they wish to scale globally.

The project is currently self-funded, and Nehme took a $15,000 loan and offered stakes to other employees within the company, including her chief designer and chief technological officer, with the majority stake resting with Nehme. The operations are based in Beirut, with freelance writers worldwide, and they review the services by incorporating a feedback mechanism from both writers and customers. Most of her employees, bar seven freelance writers, are Lebanese and TMB have recently opened offices in the Beirut Digital District as operations are based in Lebanon.

The company became profitable seven months into its foundation, with 15,000 sign ups to the website, and more than 3,000 paid users. TMB’s biggest growth is within the business plan offering, with more than $100,000 in total sales in the last year. Their target market includes any professional with a need for overhauling the presentation of their credentials. In terms of scalability, Nehme believes that their future lies with an express service, which will be rolled out in February 2016 and marketed globally. TMB’s value to the Lebanese economy is their ability to improve the chances of employment for their customers, and the opportunities offered to their own employees at what is essentially a tech-based startup. Nehme explains that their corporate social responsibility services go beyond a resume refurbishment, and regularly holds workshops and lectures on credential presentation. “I care very much about the Lebanese, and I care that they get the same chances as everyone else. What we’re offering is the chance to compete in a very tough world,” says Nehme, who hopes that TMB’s impact will come full cycle and see individuals who benefited from their services feed back into the Lebanese economy.

The post The brains of the operation appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

TEDMOB

Industry: Technology and apps

Product: Various

Product launch: 2015

Established: 2015

Employees: 14

Founder: Mario Hachem

TEDMOB – Technology Entertainment Development for Mobile – was formed at the end of August 2015 by Mario Hachem and four silent financial backers. The firm offers clients services from three main business avenues: app development, value added service to mobile operators, and offering consulting services to ‘appreneurs’ – startups which are app-based and need support during development and launch.

The target market varies with each service provided. For large scale apps, all manner of entities often need to outsource app development as they do not have the internal manpower, and clients are willing to pay around $20,000 per service. For telecom value added content services, TEDMOB is aimed at mobile operators at the mercy of over-the-top (OTT) services, such as Whatsapp, which create no revenue for the operator while pushing them into becoming internet value providers. Their service offers projects to operators which generate them recurring revenues through subscriptions, such as the music streaming app Anghami, that offers content within an app and marketing through a subscription with a mobile operator. Their final business avenue, ‘appreneurship’, offers far more than the construction of app technology but extends to guidance and advice on monetization of products, and TEDMOB already has seven clients seeking this service.

While TEDMOB is a relatively junior startup, revenues reveal a strong start, with expected revenues of $350,000 in 2015, and projections of over $1 million for 2016. Hachem’s track record of successful app development with previous companies, such as apps2you – which offers app building services to clients – allows him to guide clients through the monetization of app development. His previous apps include “LAF Shield”, which was named 2015 best M-Government app in the Arab level Safety & Security category at the Dubai/Deloitte awards. As Lebanon becomes more connected to a global technological infrastructure, the need for strong app developers becomes ever more apparent, as is providing them with opportunities to use their skills in the country.

With regards to social entrepreneurship and impact, TEDMOB’s appeal goes beyond the obvious employment of his 14 team members. Hachem’s aim is to hire 14 more graduates with minimal experience in 2016, as he argues that TEDMOB has the capacity to train fresh recruits and bring them up to scratch. TEDMOB also has plans to launch an educational academy, which targets universities and offers undergraduates internships within the company, experience that is valuable to potential future employers. Future expansion plans include a foray into the gaming industry, which Hachem hopes will generate strong income through the ‘stickiness’ – the technological term for addictiveness – of their products.

The post From apps to appreneurship appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

Taaheel

(Lebanese Association for Rehabilitation and Development)

Industry: Education

Product: Special educational needs assessment kit

Product launch: 2008

Established: 2008

Employees: 9

Founder: Hoda Bibi

Taaheel was started in 2005, when Hoda Bibi – chair of the educational department at the Lebanese International University who holds a doctorate in educational counselling – became frustrated at the standardized tools of assessment in schools, which she felt were culturally inappropriate for the MENA region. After three years she and a team developed a battery of tests which can be used to assess children to identify special needs, a first crucial step before any assistance can be offered to the child in question, and subsequently develop an educational course of action. This was developed in tandem with training for teachers to administer these tests, which Bibi outlines as a ‘toolkit’ for educational professionals. This operates under the Lebanese Association for Rehabilitation and Development (Taaheel).

The battery enables testing the IQ, mental development, and emotional intelligence of the child, and deducing the academic achievement. Each domain outlined has tests and quantitative and qualitative tools to assess children, and Bibi’s target group is teachers who are working. As many students have learning difficulties, Taaheel’s tool kit enables teachers to assess a child with tools which are more appropriate to the cultural setting, to analyze the development of the child and with the results determine an individual education plan (IEP) for the child in question. The National Council for Scientific Research sponsored the most recent study in Lebanon in 2011-2012, and Bibi has subsequently been training and selling the kit.

Bibi’s intention is to have this tool in each and every school in the Arab world, so that “students will not be victimized, and will continue their education and succeed,” especially in communities which stigmatise those with special needs. In order to expand, she designed the kit with a flexible IEP output, so it can also devise relevant IEPs for highly gifted and talented children within the region who, she describes, so often are categorized with special needs. Indeed, she eyes all children with learning difficulties within the MENA region as the target group for this product, and the ministries of each relevant country is paying for the use of this kit.

Until now, around 15 schools in Saudi Arabia and 200 schools in Lebanon employ these tests, where country-specific curricula are observed and alterations are made so the tests cater to individuals in that country and are purchased by the schools for $1,000 per kit. There is a PR section within the Taaheel team, who markets the tool kit to customers, and the Ministry of Social Affairs in Lebanon has approved the tool for use. Taaheel is now moving into a new phase, however, with developer Ziad Mugraby implementing a new technological system to make the entire kit digital and take the battery of tests online, so that licensing and usage of the tool by practitioners is facilitated in the modern day. This new technological phase began at the end of 2013 and is due to be rolled out in 2016.

The post Educating with intelligence appeared first on Executive Magazine.

This company is part of Executive’s Top 20 for 2015. Read more stories from our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section, for the latest analysis on the country’s ecosystem.

MomAdvice

Industry: e-Health

Product: Health care app

Product launch: 2016

Established: 2015

Employees: 3

Founders: Rita Deek and Nicholas Chehade

Rita Deek, a trained psychologist, was continuously approached at children’s birthday parties by mothers anxious about the psychological behavior of their children. After several rounds of questions, examples of which included how parents should deal with child bullying, she and her co-founder, child and youth counsellor Nicholas Chehade, decided to put together MomAdvice. The startup, which was formed in September 2015, is a mobile phone app that connects mothers with a team of 10 specialist child psychologists, who are vetted and have their credentials thoroughly checked by the two co-founders.

The investment in e-health related technology has been earmarked by Lebanon for Entrepreneurs (LFE) and the Investment Development Authority of Lebanon (IDAL)’s joint survey on development opportunities for Lebanon’s ICT subsector. Deek has identified mental health as an area which still attracts social stigma, and has developed an application which she feels provides an important source of support for mothers concerned about openly seeking help for their children. The app provides one-to-one chat features with psychologists who receive queries about users’ children, and respond accordingly, in a WhatsApp-style chat facility. There is no age limit to the child that can be discussed, and the app is currently being developed for both Android and iOS operating systems.

Therapy sessions are often expensive, and in Deek’s experience in Lebanon, mothers are often reluctant to seek crucial support due to financial and social pressure. The revenue model is based on subscriptions, and is currently valued at $15 per week or $50 per month for each user, with an 80:20 revenue split for the psychologists and MomAdvice respectively. While competitors exist in the US, research conducted by Deek identifies that within the region there are no psychological platforms which specifically cater to mothers and children, and she feels this gives MomAdvice an added boost as a startup which solely focuses on a niche market. MomAdvice’s ambitions for expansion stretch far beyond the region. They intend to recruit local psychologists who are certified and legal within their country of operations, and ensure they remain country specific. Currently 50 beta testers (who are mothers based in Lebanon) are giving very positive and helpful feedback. The app is due to be launched in 2016, and MomAdvice has recruited both a business and a software developer after a capital injection of $25,000 from AltCity’s Bootcamp program. According to MomAdvice’s projections, by the third year of operations the company should reach 60,000 users and generate $500,000 in income.

Overcoming the stigma surrounding the discussion of mental health is important, a stigma which is often present in any culture, and Deek hopes that the social impact of her startup will provide vulnerable individuals the chance to discuss anxiety-inducing problems. While she stresses that her team of psychologists will advise users to seek face-to-face counseling for serious issues, she concedes that there is no intermediate support network for mothers looking to receive advice on how to deal with lesser problems, such as continual bedwetting. This is a gap MomAdvice is hoping to fill.

The post Mother and child reunion appeared first on Executive Magazine.

Every year Executive highlights 20 of the finest entrepreneurs in Lebanon. For this year, we focused on companies which either had a strong environmental or social impact, and which had a large job creation prospect.

Listed in alphabetical order below, the following entrepreneurs and businesses are those that Executive has chosen as the Top 20 enterprises in the Lebanese ecosystem, which scored highly in the above categories of impact and employment. To see more about the Lebanese ecosystem, and how these companies fit into the sector, visit our entrepreneurship in Lebanon section.

CardioDiagnostics

When Ziad Sankari lost his father to a heart attack at the age of 17, the tragic circumstances motivated him to develop tools to monitor cardiac signals from the heart in a bid to catch and prevent life threatening conditions. By 2010, at age 24, he was a biomedical engineer, and in 2012 he founded CardioDiagnostics, a startup which offers wearable hardware and a service package to analyze the data received from the cardiac devices. (Read more)

Carpolo

Carpolo was started by Ralph Khairallah, a business planning instructor with previous startup experience, and Mohamad Nabaa, a recent graduate in computer science from the Beirut Arab University, in mid 2015. It’s an app dedicated to carpooling and lift sharing for university students in Lebanon. Similar to the European website BlaBlaCar, which offers shared rides to passengers from drivers between cities, Carpolo aims to reduce carbon emissions and congestion through car-sharing in the metropolitan area, and is due to be piloted at AUB. (Read more)

Dream Matcher

Ali Chehade’s Dream Matcher networking event began as an online startup, inspired by an idea for a television show which subsequently pivoted into an offline company. The  Dream Matcher ‘experience’ is a networking event that lasts for a couple of hours and hosts 50 to 70 people. During the event, participants write their dreams on post-it notes, stick them to a large wall and have them viewed by others. In a bid to help one another achieve their ambitions, participants with relevant skill sets approach the post-it writer during the event to offer their assistance with their ‘dreams’. (Read more)

Fallound

Fallound is a startup founded by Stefano Fallaha and Emad Yehya, a high school student and a computer science undergraduate at AUB respectively, who identified a gap in the social networking and messaging market. Habib Haddad, the chief executive officer of Wamda, serves as their advisor. Their product is a ‘hands-free voice-based’ app which uses 27 second voice notes to create and deliver a stream of online content that forms the base for a social network. (Read more)

Figurit

Haramoun Hamieh, a digital content manager with five years experience at Al-Hayat newspaper, and Ahmad Sharif, a senior information management consultant at Layout International, came together to form Figurit after their apparent frustrations with the workflow process within the journalism sector. They have developed an “intelligent data-driven dashboard”, as described by Hamieh, to provide journalists with information and analytics in trending stories. (Read more)

Krimston Two

Krimston labels itself as inventing the solution for all Apple lovers who are recurring travellers and tired of having to switch phones when abroad. Co-founders Fouad Fattal and Nabil Nasr have developed a product, due to go live early 2016, that is a new SIM card solution to enable users to operate a cell phone with two SIM cards. The product, which looks like a phone cover, can be understood as a ‘phone without a screen’. A SIM card slots into the cover, and a downloaded app enables the user to interchange between the two SIM cards and use them both. (Read more)

Le Wagon

When Malik El-Khoury returned to Lebanon in 2014, he was surprised at the lack of appropriate developers he could recruit for the tech startup he wished to establish. After spying a gap in the market, he decided in 2015 to licence the ‘Le Wagon’ program from the French coding school of the same name, which was formed in 2013 by Boris Paillard. Though the program itself is not an original startup, the idea of licensing and hosting such an event displays an entrepreneurial tour de force from El-Khoury, and is worthy of one of Executive’s top 20 places in this year’s startups in Lebanon. (Read more)

Lebtivity

Lebtivity was started in May 2012, after one of the five co-founders realized there was no central page in Lebanon that contained information about future hiking events. After brainstorming, they decided to expand beyond a page dedicated to hiking to include all types of events in Lebanon. Since their inception, the website has grown and people are allowed to add their event to the page for free. Randa Farah, one of the co-founders, has spoken of the positive feedback that Lebtivity has received, with many users remarking how surprised they were at the sheer quantity of events taking place in the country. (Read more)

Markelligent

Markelligent, a startup founded at the end of 2014 by Fadwa Mohanna and Elias el-Khoury, aims to harness the IoT through collecting data from the sensors and providing companies with services relating to data analytics. Their intention is to offer IoT solution packages to citizens’ pre-existing problems, generating revenue for Markelligent and improving the quality of collective lives. Once a challenge has been identified, Markelligent develops the needed sensors to measure the readings related to that challenge and start collecting all kinds of data generated by those sensors on their cloud. (Read more)

Modeo

Modeo is a young startup launched in February 2015 which caters to individuals who wish to try their hand at furniture design. Formed by two working architects, Emile Arayes and Aline Gemayel, who were frustrated by the lack of low-budget  assembly furniture, Modeo allows users to build custom plastic furniture through a mobile app interface, and uses geometric “interlocking modular parts” to assemble a range of pieces. The design can be viewed in a virtual interface before ordering, with sizing and color options, as either a 2D designed image or a 3D projection. (Read more)

MomAdvice

Rita Deek, a trained psychologist, was continuously approached at children’s birthday parties by mothers anxious about the psychological behavior of their children. After several rounds of questions, examples of which included how parents should deal with child bullying, she and her co-founder, child and youth counsellor Nicholas Chehade, decided to put together MomAdvice. The startup, which was formed in September 2015, is a mobile phone app that connects mothers with a team of 10 specialist child psychologists, who are vetted and have their credentials thoroughly checked by the two co-founders. (Read more)

Moodfit

In 2014 Tarek Jaroudi, Mohamed Sabouneh and Ghassan Abi Fadel, students in the American University of Beirut’s (AUB) MBA program, were frustrated with the lack of easy communication between interior designers and potential clients, and came together to form Moodfit. Having conducted extensive research with suppliers, designers and clients, the final product is an online interior design program which enables a user to transform a space with the help of top interior designers, and removes the need for the continuous on-the-ground presence of an interior designer. (Read more)

Next Automated Robots

What started as a final year university project at the Lebanese American University in Byblos in August 2014 has evolved into Next Automated Robots (NAR), a startup in Speed’s acceleration program that is working to produce a fully-autonomous 24/7 drone called “QuadroFighter”. The aim of the drone is to detect wildfires at an early stage, and target markets are governments and private NGOs, or individuals cultivating wide areas of land. The drone alerts the user through desktop or mobile applications, without piloting, and relays the coordinates of the wildfire. (Read more)

ReAble

When Emile Sawaya’s younger brother was diagnosed with autism seven years ago, he became aware that the market offered very limited technological tools for independence for those with cognitive difficulties. Fast forward to 2015, Sawaya and his blind co-founder, Paul Saifi, have developed the ‘ReAble wallet’ that focuses on money management and financial transactions for people with autism and eventually for a broader range of people with special needs. Sawaya’s main motivation is that many people with autism have difficulties with the concept of understanding value and the premise of value exchange, especially with monetary difference that is owed to them after a transaction. (Read more)

Sensio AIR

Sensio AIR is the creation of Cyrille Najjar and neuroscientist Eve Tamraz, who founded the White Lab in early 2015 and have recently relocated to London with the second phase of the UK Lebanon Tech Hub acceleration program. Their product centers around a piece of hardware which detects “allergens like pollen, acarids and mold as well as harmful gasses” as quoted by the company, and feeds data on the quality of the air back to an app on a mobile device for analysis and notification. The patent for their device is filed in both the UK and Lebanon, which they have identified as key parts to their main sales market. (Read more)

Taaheel

Taaheel was started in 2005, when Hoda Bibi – chair of the educational department at the Lebanese International University who holds a doctorate in educational counselling – became frustrated at the standardized tools of assessment in schools, which she felt were culturally inappropriate for the MENA region. After three years she and a team developed a battery of tests which can be used to assess children to identify special needs, a first crucial step before any assistance can be offered to the child in question, and subsequently develop an educational course of action. (Read more)

TEDMOB

TEDMOB – Technology Entertainment Development for Mobile – was formed at the end of August 2015 by Mario Hachem and four silent financial backers. The firm offers clients services from three main business avenues: app development, value added service to mobile operators, and offering consulting services to ‘appreneurs’ – startups which are app-based and need support during development and launch. (Read more)

Teens Who Code

Teens Who Code is the brainchild of co-founders Nour Atrissi and Ziad Alameh, who met in AltCity and decided to form a startup in October 2014 dedicated to teaching young adults how to computer program in different languages in 2014. Aimed at improving computer literacy amongst teenagers, Teens Who Code offers courses and private sessions to individuals in a number of different areas, from web development and Raspberry Pi classes, to android and iOS development. (Read more)

TickleMyBrain

Tara Nehme, the Lebanese-Canadian founder of TickleMyBrain (TMB), first noticed that people’s resumes needed assistance when a friend asked her to check their CV at the last moment before applying for a job in Dubai. What started as a small career advice blog in 2012 has evolved into an online platform dedicated to improving the presentations of users’ credentials. TMB offers services for improving documents (such as resumes and various applications) uploaded to their website for a minimal fee of $99 for the basic package, and $5,000 for a business plan. (Read more)

Urbacraft

Sabine de Maussion and Ayssar Arida developed urbacraft in 2014 after identifying a gap in the toy industry for locally appropriate toys. Their main product is a hybrid “customizable building set” which allows individuals of all ages to form buildings out of modular plastic pieces – ‘urbs’ – and other printable materials and elements – ‘kits’ – such as a cardboard façade, which can be added and ‘hacked’ (e.g. ‘colored in’) by the user. Unlike other composite toy creators, urbacraft’s philosophy is rooted in open source construction, and allows the user to add parts they designed themselves. (Read more)

The post Top 20 Entrepreneurs in 2015 appeared first on Executive Magazine.

In December Lebanon, alongside 194 other countries, was represented in Paris for what was expected to be another conference promising to mitigate pollution but delivering little in way of curbing the pace of climate change. After high profile conferences in Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009 failed to obligate countries to reduce pollution, the mood leading up to the Paris conference was for more good intentions and empty promises. Yet, surprisingly, after two weeks of talks the 195 countries agreed to reduce carbon emissions — it’s being dubbed the beginning of the end for the fossil fuel era — a move that could alter the economic landscape for fuel importing countries, like Lebanon.

But to reach the goals of the Paris accord, officially referred to as the Paris Agreement, and limit a rise in global temperature levels, political will is required. France’s foreign minister and chair of the Paris conference, Laurent Fabius, called the agreement a “historical turning point”. Other global leaders — United Nations officials and heads of state, even the Pope — have echoed this sentiment. The highest levels of international politics might, hopefully, drive momentum downward to the domestic level. Lebanon is already working to reduce its emissions largely through renewable energy projects, but the country will need various measures of legislation to continue forward. Can political will at the international level trickle down to Lebanon, or will the status quo of local policy making remain?

International financing

Where the Kyoto and Copenhagen conferences failed, Paris succeeded. The overarching result of the accord is an agreement to avert catastrophic climate change by limiting a rise in global temperature levels to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (with wording in the agreement urging the temperature increase to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible) by the end of the century. To do so, countries agreed to transparent reporting of their emission reductions, to meet every five years to assess and modify their pledges so that the 2 degree (or 1.5 degree) goal stays within reach, and put forth a notion of collective responsibility — no more is there a stark distinction between rich and poorer nations (see L’accord de Paris explainer).

For the most part, this will require massive investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects that, simultaneously, would phase out fossil fuel use and reduce carbon emission. Wealthy economies, like the United States and European Union, have pledged to channel at least $100 billion annually to help poorer economies finance green projects.

Lebanon has already benefited from international financing and more help is expected as the likely momentum established with the Paris accord snowballs moving forward. The European Union granted 11.9 million euros ($13 million) to subsidize interest rates and increase payment periods for projects that fall under Lebanon’s National Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Action (NEEREA) plan — a financing mechanism for green energy projects initiated by the central bank. The World Bank channeled a $15 million loan through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to help manufacturers reduce emissions. Parliament met for a rare meeting in November 2015 to approve two loans that were set to expire — one from the European Investment Bank and the other from the French Development Agency. The loans account for some $40 million that will be invested in renewable and energy efficiency projects in 2016.

Vahakn Kabakian, climate change project manager at the Ministry of Environment and part of Lebanon’s delegation to the Paris conference, and Pierre el Khoury, director of the Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation at the Ministry of Energy and Water, both agree that international financing will be very important for Lebanon to reach its emission reduction contribution. They say that the availability of international financing will increase, not immediately but moving toward 2020 as momentum picks up. Naming a few donors as examples Khoury says, “We will be moving towards real money — Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, the European Investment Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Sustainable Energy for All initiatives of the United Nations — will all have money to support and give loans. So, starting from the Paris accord and onward there will be money to be invested.”

Stimulus money

The bottom-up approach agreed upon in Paris to mitigate climate change places countries in the driver’s seat to implement renewable and energy efficiency projects. Kabakian points out that international money will help Lebanon move faster toward installing renewables and energy efficiency projects, but the primary chunk of financing is coming domestically. Available financing via Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, both Kabakian and Khoury agree, has made Lebanon a role model in the Middle East. Through several circulars dating back to 2010 and its subsequent stimulus plans the central bank provides, in theory, a $1 billion credit line annually to be invested in green projects through near interest‑free loans.

Since 2011, Khoury says, direct investment in renewables, energy efficiency and green buildings stood at $450 million. In early December 2015 BDL Governor Riad Salameh told a conference audience that the bank’s initiative had created 10,000 jobs and 270 companies, with the credit line financing some 325 projects. While the available credit has not been fully utilized, it is expected in 2016 that another $300–400 million will be injected, says Khoury.

BDL has, essentially, created a niche sustainable energy market. Businesses and factories, for example, have taken advantage of the financing mechanism to install rooftop photovoltaic systems. Some of Lebanon’s biggest banks are already involved in financing sustainable energy projects, Khoury says, and the hope is that more will join. “We still have [several] banks that are not involved yet but they will be in the near future. The culture is there,” he says, adding that “without the Paris accord it would have been tougher [but] now it will be easier for private investors to work with Lebanese banks – whenever they need money to invest in a renewable energy project they will have [more] choices, banks and financial institutions will have the money.”

Market segment

The Paris accord piqued the interest of many an investor at top banks and funds in the world’s financial capitals. The presence of top executives from financial institutions at the climate conference did not go unnoticed and the early indication is investment portfolios will shift toward the growing renewable energy industry. Goldman Sachs, an American multinational investment banking firm, recently said the global market size for renewables plus hybrid and electric vehicles was worth $600 billion last year.

There are both structural and legislative challenges that Lebanon must address to develop renewables and energy efficiency as a market segment. As part of the goal to reduce emissions by installing renewables and limiting dependency on imported fossil fuel, Lebanon will need to restructure its electricity sector. Redirecting the $2 billion that Electricite du Liban (EDL) receives annually to help cover the cost of generation — it pays only $25 per barrel with the treasury covering the difference — is a measure that director general of the Ministry of Finance, Alain Bifani, calls for. In a December interview with Executive, he said the subsidy needs to end because Lebanon can no longer afford it, even with the breathing room that current low oil prices provide.

The view from the Ministry of Environment’s Kabakian differs — removing EDL’s subsidy will make renewables much more cost effective if not cheaper. “We can make [renewables] cheaper and that’s what most developed countries do. If you really want to expand it, you need to make sure that it’s going to cost less.” The goal is to satisfy 12 percent of the country’s electricity needs by 2020 and 15 percent by 2030 through renewable sources — percentages based on Lebanon’s current 2,500 megawatts of EDL production plus private generator production. Khoury says that, so far, Lebanon has installed 21 megawatts of solar energy and expects another 50 megawatts to be installed in 2016. A large measure of Lebanon’s reduction in emissions will come not only from installing the type of megawatts Khoury mentions but also from decentralizing renewable energy production, and installing energy efficiency solutions, at offices and homes. For this, business engagement is key.

Developing a robust market segment will help Lebanon hold up its end of the climate change agreement, but the central bank initiatives are not enough. “[The market] will definitely plateau if the system doesn’t change. It’s a market and you can only sell a certain amount of [photovoltaic cells] that only a certain [number] of people think is beneficial. Some will look at a higher rate of return of income, for example, or less payback period. If you don’t provide that it won’t grow anymore,” Kabakian says. The central bank financing has incentivized the private sector with companies seeing the dollar signs align in their favor when looking at potential returns on investment over the long term. But renewable energy projects, from small to large, do have investment barriers that, even with subsidized loans, can carry an uncomfortable level of risk that might stunt market growth if left unchecked.

“With [the measures] we have currently [the market] will grow a bit — my analysis will be that it will plateau in a couple of years and that will be it. Either you need to have big investments taking place and then help the decentralized systems to grow at the household level, or this is it,” Kabakian says. Installing solar panels on rooftops of buildings is incentivized financially by the central bank but Lebanon needs to legislate a net metering scheme — a billing mechanism crediting renewable energy providers for feeding electricity into the public grid — to scale installation and decentralize small-scale renewable electricity production. Passing net metering legislation, Kabakian says, would exponentially increase the pace of decentralizing renewable energy.

Derisking decentralization is also an issue at the utility level because EDL does not generate enough electricity to provide 24 hours to the public grid. “Even if you have net metering installed, you don’t have electricity on your grid [so] you won’t be able to evacuate electricity to the grid. So not having 24 hours [of supply] hinders your net metering process but that’s also hindering us [from] getting to the 24 hours. This is part of derisking practically,” Kabakian says.

For large-scale renewable energy projects — wind and solar farms, hydroelectric — investors will need reassurance that EDL can uptake the produced electricity. So as long as there is no assurance, investors will calculate a level of risk pushing up the cost for renewables in Lebanon. Lowering the cost of installation and operation is key to attracting financing from foreign investors. It is even more important, says Kabakian, for donors channeling money as per the Paris accord. As Kabakian puts it, “[donors] want to get the most reduction per dollar invested. Reducing a ton of CO2 is cheaper in China than it is in Lebanon [so they will] go to China. [Whether] carbon is reduced in Lebanon or in China, the impact will be the same globally.”

On the side of energy efficiency, reducing Lebanon’s carbon emissions will be accomplished in the construction sector by requiring geo-thermal thresholds for new buildings — encouraged by the central bank initiative — but this necessitates legislation to force builders to meet standards. The environment ministry also has a plan to encourage, by financial incentive, individuals to swap their old gas guzzler for a new fuel efficient vehicle. This too would require legislation, both to regulate vehicle emissions and because the scheme would alter sources of revenue to the public coffer like Customs import and registration fees.

A spoke in the wheel

Meeting Lebanon’s contribution to emission reduction will require the government to approve the technical roadmap that has been prepared and agreed upon in Paris. Lebanon will also need smaller legislative bills to regulate vehicle emissions and require builders to meet green standards in new construction projects. The small incremental legislative changes do not seem to be much of a hurdle moving forward.

But structural changes will be. Years of deferring waste management solutions came to a head in 2015 when the government decided to close the Naameh sanitary landfill with no alternative in place — garbage has since piled up on city streets with the only options to toss it in open air dumps or burn it where it lay. Electricity production, too, is a decades old problem. For years, electricity infrastructure and EDL have been allowed to decay — the country does not generate enough electricity to satisfy demand so businesses and households must turn to private generators that belch toxic fumes into the air.

While these issues do not spell doom for Lebanon’s plan to reduce its emissions, they do demonstrate the country’s leaders’ complete neglect for the environment and disinterest in ventures that do not line their pockets. There is no political will to implement the structural changes needed for clean, sustainable solutions for waste management and electricity production because the financial motivations to do so do not currently align with the interests of Lebanon’s political class.

Lebanon has put the technical preparations to reduce emissions in place, Kabakian says, and when the political will is there, the plan will be implemented. Hopefully the momentum built in Paris will work its way down to the local level, so that Lebanon’s politicians prioritize the environment and ratify the climate change plan into law.

Infographic by Joseph Kaï

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Growing populations, rising demand on resources and mounting environmental pressures are putting an increasing global strain on water resources. In the Middle East in particular, stressed river basins shared by countries are increasingly experiencing problems, and global climate change will only exacerbate this.

December’s landmark Paris Agreement on climate change was not primarily about water-related issues, but a strong connection exists: climatic change continues to have an impact on many things, including water. Yet how seriously are governments and institutions taking this imminent threat? Some answers have come in a new book, “Transboundary Water Management and the Climate Change Debate”, by a group of international scholars covering global examples as well as ones from the Middle East. The book’s premise is that actors within transboundary water management institutions respond to the climate change debate in three ways: adapting to predicted impacts; resisting them (by ignoring the issues); or subversion (using the climate change debate to fulfill their own agendas). The authors then apply this framework to cases with global repercussions, such as the Jordan River basin.

Further elaborating these themes through an article entitled “Adaptation, Resistance, or Subversion: How Will Water Politics Be Affected by Climate Change?” in the New Security Beat blog of the respected Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, three of the book’s co-authors make the interesting point that the hydraulic impacts of climatic changes are quite often deemed to be of such a magnitude that responses are unreasonably crafted in the context of national security. They call this ‘securitization’, and in all of the cases analyzed for “Transboundary Water Management and the Climate Change Debate”, there is evidence of responses to climatic debates becoming subject to such a threat, whereby “impacts are deemed to be of such a magnitude that responses should be crafted in the context of national security”, emphasizing that “this is important because it creates an incentive to close off deliberation to outsiders and makes it less likely decisions will be made in an open, transparent way with multiple stakeholders represented.”

In the case of Jordan and much of the region, problems of securitization are evident in water diplomacy. This entwining of water and national security requires confidentiality, which is a common need in diplomatic or political discussions. However, subjecting vital negotiations on water issues to blanket blackouts for reasons of security is not a good idea. As an antidote to this state of affairs, the authors note that “ultimately, renewed political commitment to open institutional structures will be needed to mitigate these risks.” The key of course is openness: “We need to find ways to bring the fears, hopes and aspirations which basin actors may harbor about climate change into open discussion within joint institutions.” By doing so, these frameworks become more legitimate and resilient, making securitization less likely as they become better at dealing with changing conditions, including climate change, and demands from various parties.

Examples of this problem can be seen in Jordan and its neighbors to the west, who are together trying to implement elaborate water schemes in the Jordan Valley, also extending through the Dead Sea basin to the Gulf of Aqaba. It should be mentioned that water is very scarce in Jordan, where about 9 percent of the land is desert. The kingdom, home to a growing local population as well as a large influx of refugees from Syria, is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world.

Red–Dead Sea Project

Like other water-short countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, Jordan seeks to preserve domestic hydraulic resources through importing water “virtually” through commodities with a relatively high volume of water used for production, such as agricultural products, while exporting those that are less water-intensive. As such, Jordan imports about 7 billion cubic meters (m3) of virtual water annually compared to 1 billion m3 withdrawn from domestic water sources per year.

However, such dependence of Jordan and other water-scarce states on external supplies of water can be exploited politically. In that respect, amid regional disputes and diplomatic tension that increasingly prevail in the Middle East, the pursuit of solutions to hydraulic problems within a classic basin framework may offer the false argument that neighbors sharing the same geo-hydraulics have an interest in cooperating while “setting politics aside”. An example of this came in December 2013 when Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement involving the Jordan River–Wadi Araba area, aimed at constructing in the south of Jordan a plant with a capacity of about 80 million m3 per year to desalinate water from the Red Sea, 30 million m3 of which will be retained by Jordan. The facility will supply the southern Israeli city of Eilat with 50 million m3 of desalinated water at cost value, and Israel will deliver the same amount to central Jordan for JOD 0.27 ($0.38) per m3, to be pumped from the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, from where Palestine will also receive 30 million m3 of freshwater. In addition, a pipeline will dump brine from desalination into the Dead Sea to mitigate its current annual decline, estimated at one meter.

However, the deal is seen as continuing to ignore riparian rights of Palestinians, meaning their rights to use water that flows through their territories, on the Dead Sea. Additionally, environmental groups have warned that the project could undermine the fragile ecosystem of the Dead Sea, which they fear could be contaminated by Red Sea brine. (The agreement was signed in Washington DC and brokered by the United States under a shroud of secrecy in the name of securitization, a factor that is felt to have contributed to the scheme’s weaknesses and reservations about it.)

Similar issues have arisen in connection with the Red Sea–Dead Sea Conveyance Project, another — albeit much larger — Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian initiative in the same area seeking to meet increasing water needs while stemming the shrinking of the Dead Sea. For that, Jordan signed an agreement with Israel last February on the first phase of the project’s implementation to build a pipeline linking the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. In December, Jordan issued a call for tenders for the project’s first construction phase. This first phase — at an estimated cost of up to $900 million — involves a transfer of 300 million m3 of seawater each year from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. In the following phases, the project entails transferring up to 2 billion m3 annually. Jordan has invited private companies to submit prequalification documents for the development and execution of the project’s first phase by the end of March 2016.

However, one of the project’s further shortcomings may be that it does not sufficiently answer to — possibly yet unknown — global climate change factors. Such factors could upset project calculations through, for example, much higher or lower rainfall in the Jordan Valley.

The Politics in Hydraulics

Both of these accords are a continuation of Israel’s policy of “economic peace” which simply means collaboration on various projects without restoring Palestinian and other Arab rights. These basin agreements that the cash-strapped governments of Jordan and Palestine might be pushed to accept would end up undermining rights and, in the longer run, stunt sustainable development. At the same time, secrecy and the culture of securitization in general help to ram such accords through, flouting public and expert opinion.

Israeli governments have taken this approach since the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo agreement and the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, both of which include water provisions and call for joint hydraulic projects. However, these ideas and plans should contribute towards a just, lasting and comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab countries, and not as a substitute for it. Meanwhile, regional and global hydraulics have changed dramatically over the past two decades, partly due to climatic changes. In such a context, a narrow basin-based approach can, unwittingly or not, result in false solutions to water problems.

Unless drastic measures are taken, climate change (and the whole issue of a two-degree celsius rise in temperature as debated in Paris at the COP21 conference) will continue to affect our region negatively, particularly when it comes to water scarcity and desertification. Extreme versions of hot, dry summers with record high temperatures in some parts of the region at two degrees celsius or more above previous maxima have become more prevalent in the Middle East. The large temperature spikes that have been seen in the past few decades in Jordan and throughout the Middle East, combined with inadequate systems of land and hydraulic management, are leading to a profound spread of deserts and water shortages.

In this kind of situation, more open debate and transparency are needed, not less. Sadly, the political cultures of Jordan and Palestine largely accept restrictions on public discussion imposed by securitization — restrictions Israel and America largely frown upon at home, despite practicing them abroad. At the same time, as hapless leaders and populaces from Ramallah to Amman look on, Israeli decision-makers can ignore water-related climatic issues to push through regional political agendas based on unsustainable and unjust normalization of relations.

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“This Agreement… aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including by:

(a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;

(b) Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production;

(c) Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.

This Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances.”

Article 2, Paris Agreement

When it comes to managing our planet, the human race has finally succeeded in learning a few things. One lesson is that climate is something that we do influence but cannot control. Au contraire, the climate controls us in spite of all our technology. A second lesson is that we have to adapt in order to survive in the third millennium just as Paleolithic humans needed to adapt as groups to survive environmental changes during the Pleistocene era. For modern man, this adaptation is, however, a collective challenge to achieve culture change on a planetary level.

The third insight to ponder is that it is much better to affirm a chance than to obsess on downside risks. Dealing wisely with what we cannot control but are able to influence positively as very large collectives — i.e. humanity, the community of nations, single nations and business enterprises — represents a humongous opportunity with millennial consequences. Not trying to capitalize on the chance to curb climate change would mean to simultaneously fall into an intellectual ice age and invoke a slow meltdown of the global economic core.

The trigger event for this historic chance is the global agreement on reduction of global warming reached at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2015, the so-called COP21 Paris event. In the best case it will be a tipping point in dealing with the human impacts on our climate, including a very achievable Lebanese contribution to reducing our carbon emissions (see explainer).

From a species perspective, the breakthrough of Paris lies in the declaration of a humanity-wide shared goal and collective affirmation to pursue this goal. One will be hard pressed to find any precedent for such in-principle consensus at historic events of the 20th century — from peace conferences to the founding assemblies of organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations. The closest examples for similar formulations of a shared global will are probably the UN’s Millennium Development Goals of 2000 and their successor targets, the Sustainable Development Goals.

For implementing the Paris Agreement, national determinations are key. The agreement establishes a positive framework for national contributions. However, realizing and expanding these contributions will be a task for the sovereign institutions of the 195 states that have committed to the Paris Agreement and are expected to ratify it. The process will be complex and arduous but it comes with hope that passions and energies which were in the past wasted on debates over the reality of human climate impacts will now be invested into agreeable and achievable measures.

Bringing the climate chance [intended] process down to national levels, every country is asked to fulfill its responsibility. For countries in the Middle East, climate change-related responsibilities include not only implementation of emission goals but also needed measures for managing scarce and vital natural resources, water being at the top of the list (see comment on water resources).

For Lebanon, the call for action entails two main aspects: private and public. The country will need to continue incentive programs — primarily financed through central bank stimulus — to implement emission reduction measures. To maximize the impact of those measures, Lebanon will need to tap into external financing from donors and international institutions. This is doable (see Lebanon’s implementation of accord) but requires fiscal diligence and something totally new: political self-denial. This means that the next Lebanese government — yes, Executive still insists that we need a full government asap — will have to pass a number of laws, achieve real cooperation between ministries instead of allowing fragmented fiefdoms, and demonstrate to international funders that their money is well and efficiently invested, with the maximum outcome in emissions reductions, when provided to Lebanon.

On the private sector, our call to action is to be smart, decisive and proactive. Known for their adaptability and quickness in engineering practical solutions, various Lebanese entrepreneurs have demonstrated in recent years that they can devise alternative energy answers to problems in markets that face inherent restraints (such as, ahem, frequent interruptions of governmental power supply). As observed and documented by Executive, solar, creative energy storage, and very feasible power management solutions have been innovated by Lebanese companies. With certainty, these can be developed further and put to ecologically responsible profit generation in the growing and decentralizing markets of emerging and frontier economies in decades to come. The shift out of fossil fuels and into alternative energies is a chance for Lebanese entrepreneurs to do good, work economically, create jobs, and reduce our output gap. Unmissable.      

Returning to the global perspective, the climate change chance is a once-for-a-species opportunity that, if missed, may not recur in the next 5,000 years. This quantification is of course totally over the top and completely arbitrary but there is truth in it — and doesn’t it sound impressive?

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For nearly five years the conflict has dragged on; yet the world is only more daunted by the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis. Here in Lebanon the challenges are numerous – from the strained economy and infrastructure to health care, education, politics and security. All aspects of life have been affected. But we cannot afford to wait out the crisis; it is time we address the opportunities rather than the challenges, building on our core strengths. Lebanon’s unique style of innovative entrepreneurship has kept the country afloat even through decades of internal violence, and it can continue to do so now.

This year, refugees are facing yet another cold winter living in tents. Dozens of organizations are providing relief. But given the protracted nature of the conflict, we at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other agencies are going back to the drawing board and rethinking how best to provide long-term help to the more than 1.2 million Syrian refugees and the Lebanese host community.

Partnerships with the private sector are key. Lebanese entrepreneurs can develop the innovative technologies and solutions that will revolutionize the way the government and aid agencies provide assistance. Some of these technologies already exist and just need to be adopted: in Kenya, the ICRC uses mobile money transfers to give cash more simply, securely and cost effectively. Other technologies are just emerging, such as the olive-husk generator that the ICRC recently set up in Shebaa. It can heat an entire health-care facility using biodegradable material that is three times cheaper than conventional energy sources. These types of engineering solutions can make a huge difference in getting people the water, energy and shelter they need.

Sustainable business initiatives too are helping people get back on their feet. We recently led a programme that helped Lebanese people coming back from Syria to start their own business raising livestock and selling dairy products. Other such initiatives could help people become more self-sufficient and improve their standard of living. Companies and aid agencies both stand to gain from sharing each other’s perspectives and expertise in logistics, managing large-scale operations, human resources and networking.

The people that we are helping today are those that will one day rebuild Syria. It is in Lebanon’s interest for Syria to be rebuilt by a healthy, educated and skilled workforce. That is why efforts by aid agencies and the private sector to help those in need and bolster the economy should be backed by government policies and regulations. Policies should make it easier and provide incentives for companies and individuals to develop new technologies and solutions. Labour and education laws should be reformed to safeguard the rights of both Lebanese people and refugees and help fill jobs in sectors such as nursing. Legislation should support broad-based growth and improve the stability of the country.

In turn, the Lebanese government needs the full support of the international community. This month, world leaders, international aid agencies, NGOs and members of civil society are meeting in London for the Supporting Syria conference, co-hosted by the UK, Germany, Kuwait, Norway and the United Nations. Its goal is to secure funding to help those most affected by the crisis both inside Syria and in neighbouring countries. Participants will also work on long-term solutions for educating and creating jobs for people who have been forced to flee their homes. Theirs is no easy task: for five years now there has not been enough funding and the conflict has shown no signs of abating.

If efforts at the London conference fail to come up with long-lasting solutions, then next winter, like this one, will be a bleak reminder of the increasingly precarious situation that people are facing. For now we, together with the Lebanese Red Cross, are distributing food and other relief items to Syrian and Palestinian refugees, Lebanese returnees and Lebanese families who are struggling to make ends meet. We have installed insulation in tent settlements and shelters to help with heat retention and made other improvements to prevent flooding during the rainy season. We are also transferring cash to the people in the most precarious situations so that they can purchase much-needed heating fuel. But as the people of Syria and Lebanon wait for a serious political solution that will end their suffering, they cannot simply rely on aid.

It is time for the Lebanese private sector, with the help of the government, to live up to its long-standing reputation of ingenuity and help turn this crisis around – both for the Lebanese people and for those who have fallen victim to the conflict. The ICRC has been in Lebanon for every major conflict since 1967. We have seen first-hand Lebanon’s ability to overcome obstacles and find innovative solutions, even in the darkest of times. It may not be easy, but it is possible.

* A version of this article appeared in Executive’s February issue, #199.

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