Author: Diala Ahwach, Program & Research Coordinator – Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
This report presents the qualitative findings of the FORWARD project, “Assessing the Future of Work for Forward-Looking Universal Social Protection: A Comparative Study of Lebanon and Egypt.” FORWARD examines how two structural forces reshaping contemporary labor markets, the rapid spread of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, and the transition to a low-carbon economy, are interacting with decades of neoliberal economic policy to transform work and to expose the limits of existing social protection systems. The project 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) 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 labor law and labor activism; an authority on international labor standards; researchers focused on the gendered dimensions of the gig and platform economy; experts on the green and energy transition; economists and specialists in development financing; analysts of digitalization, digital security, and the platform economy; specialists in social protection policy; and advocates and researchers working with groups that are too often absent from labor-market analysis, including LGBTQI+ communities and older persons. This range was intentional: it allows the synthesis to read each transition not as an isolated technical shift but through the eyes of those who study its consequences for specific workers and communities.
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 broad transformations affect particular groups.
The shared diagnosis sets the tone for everything that follows. The report is organized around the three transitions and their intersection with social protection, before turning to the groups most affected and to the policy directions the interviews suggest. It opens from a single analytical premise on which the interviews converge, and which frames the chapters that follow.
The KIIs all converge on one key analytical statement: labor market transformations are taking place in Lebanon within a structurally informal labor market, governed by an outdated 1946 labor law that is unable to adapt as needed, and served by a weakened and impoverished National Social Security Fund (NSSF) that covers only a small percentage of the population. This means that these transformations are unfolding in an unshielded society, where vulnerability is a societal reality rather than a group or fractional categorization. As such, the transformations are part of a storm hitting an already shaky ship, characterized by pre-existing welfare gaps, fragmented and inefficient systems, and overwhelming vulnerability, which they are further reshaping.
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