Alternative Financing for Universal Social Protection in the Arab Region: A Qualitative Research Synthesis

Author: Ghassan Aldaoud, Program & Research Assistant – Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)

This report presents the qualitative research findings of the Finance4All project, “Alternative Financing for Universal Social Protection in the Arab Region.” The project examines how conventional, International Financial Institutions (IFI)-shaped financing mechanisms, entailing poverty-targeting, donor dependency, and a covert pattern of fiscal austerity, are interacting with decades of politico-economic dynamics to entrench fragmentation and expose the limits of existing social protection systems and their financial sustainability. The impact on vulnerable groups, including but not limited to women, children, older persons, migrants, refugees, rural communities, and informal workers, is central to the project. Finance4All is committed to open and transparent research; in keeping with that commitment to making its data publicly available, this report is a synthesis – not an analysis – of the Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) and a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) conducted for the Lebanon component of the study, alongside a thorough literature review.

The interviews were conducted with a deliberately wide range of experts whose work, taken together, spans the full terrain the project sets out to map. They include specialists in academic research on social protection and political economy; practitioners with direct institutional experience of the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) and its governance; legal experts versed in Lebanon’s labor and social insurance framework; leading economists and analysts of fiscal policy, taxation, and debt with global expertise, 

and civil society actors and advocates working with the populations most excluded from formal coverage. This was complemented by a Focus Group Discussion with participants working directly with marginalised communities in Lebanon. This range was intentional, allowing for the synthesis to read the failures of conventional financing not as an isolated technical shortfall but through the eyes of those who study, administer, or live with its consequences.

Throughout the report, interviewees are identified by anonymized codes (e.g., KII-1, KII-2, and so on) rather than by name. The aim is to let the analytical weight of the interviews come through in the voices of the people who provided it, while organizing their insights into a coherent account. The report does not claim representativeness of findings; its value lies in the depth of information, in the convergence of independent experts on a shared diagnosis, in major differentiating inputs, and in the specificity with which they trace how financing choices affect particular groups.

The shared diagnosis sets the tone for most of what follows. The report is organized around a mapping of Lebanon’s social protection landscape, an examination of how conventional financing has shaped and constrained that landscape, an assessment of alternative financing pathways, and the cross-cutting barriers that stand in their way. It opens from a single analytical premise on which the interviews converge, and which frames the chapters that follow.

The KIIs and FGD all converge on one key analytical statement: Lebanon’s resource problem is not, at its core, a problem of scarcity; it is a problem of political will. Fragmentation across the NSSF, the cooperative civil servants’ scheme, and dedicated sectarian funds is not incidental but politically functional, distributing social provision as a tool of patronage rather than as a universal right. Conventional financing, poverty-targeted safety nets designed and funded by the World Bank, IMF-aligned austerity absorbed covertly through currency collapse rather than announced cuts, and a regressive, poorly enforced tax system, have not merely failed to build universality; they have actively constructed the conditions that make universality harder to achieve. This means that alternative financing mechanisms, progressive taxation, debt restructuring, contributory reform, and climate finance, are, by the evidence gathered, technically feasible and internationally precedented; what stands in their way is the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the few who benefit. 

To read the full synthesis: Click here!