The monthly dashboard summarizes the progress made by partners involved in the Lebanon Crisis Response and highlights trends affecting people in need. Partners in Lebanon are working to ensure that for vulnerable groups, especially youth, access to income and employment is improved.
Sector Progress
In the third quarter of 2016, the livelihoods sector recorded progress against all its priority outputs, albeit with varying levels. This is in line with the financial situation of the sector, which has doubled the funding received in the last quarter, to reach 20mUSD secured to equal its end of 2015 level. However this remains grossly insufficient, with 86% of the sector appeal remaining unfunded.
The main area of progress was recorded in the provision of accelerated skills training, with a dozen partners enrolling over 6,600 beneficiaries.
This constitutes a remarkable threefold increase compared to the first half of the year. Noteworthy, over 25% of the recent beneficiaries are male, compared to less than 15% average in the past two years. In a context of mismatch between labour demand and supply, and where technical vocational education curricula need modernization, accelerated training is an efficient way to increase the employability of vulnerable groups, when coupled with job-creation efforts. However, so far partners typically report that beneficiaries (in particular women) will primarily benefit from programmes through home-based activities, while less than 10% of beneficiaries have been placed into jobs three month after completing trainings. The sector held a lessons learnt workshop on skills training in June to facilitate exchange of experiences between partners and increase their impact. Key recommendations from the workshop was that skills training programmes must be based on proper market research and accompanied by career guidance or internship schemes. Unfortunately, the short-term nature of current funding prevents evidence based programming as well as follow up with beneficiaries – so far only 1,000 people benefitted from the career guidance and 225 from internship schemes, or less than 20% of the trainee caseload, and 10% of the 12,500 target.
Results in terms of local economic development remained more limited, and not in balance with efforts on skills training, since no job creation were reported this quarter. Most notably support to businesses, which slowed down with only 40 businesses supported this quarter.
Yet several large programmes are ongoing and will only show results towards the end of the year – however this will not cover the gap between trained beneficiaries and job opportunities created. Nearly 800 entrepreneurs and employees received business management trainings (40% youth) and 500 micro-businesses accessed micro-finance.
As 4 out 5 businesses supported by livelihoods partners are micro-business rather than SMEs, partners reported that their interventions result more in maintaining existing jobs in these businesses rather than creating new ones, with an estimated 331 jobs maintained this quarter.
Labour intensive public work has remained limited to 1,000 beneficiaries rehabilitating infrastructures in 100 villages, which is half of the results achieved by the third quarter in 2015. Initiating new job-creation programmes will be crucial for the next quarter.