Launching La Table is more than opening a restaurant, it’s making a meaningful, long-term investment. With limited savings, choosing the wrong location would turn a dream into a risk. To avoid guessing, I turned to data. The goal was simple: find a town in Lebanon where visitors (locals and tourists) already show strong interest, yet the restaurant market remains underserved. Lebanon’s tourism and investment patterns often move in opposite directions. Some towns attract visitors but receive no development, while others receive projects despite having little demand. For a new restaurant, this imbalance makes it difficult to know where genuine opportunity lies. I needed a location that is not saturated or speculative, but strategically overlooked. Step 1: Scanning the Chaos for Opportunity – Lebanon as a whole (Action for Viewer: use the Establishment Type filter and select Restaurants.) Focusing on restaurants first, the national view shows two categories:
High-tourism towns with no initiatives (Blue): attractive but saturated with existing restaurants.
Funded towns with low tourism (Orange): received investments but struggle with attracting visitors.
We’re looking for a true blue diamond in an orange districts: a place with potential but still ignored. Step 2: The first zoom – Targeting Hasbaya
We must narrow the focus from the whole country to a high-potential region. We start by targeting the beautiful Hasbaya District.
The lowest point of the orange clutter: Hasbaya sits at the edge of the national clutter, away from saturation yet rich in natural beauty and tourism interest. It becomes the logical next step for deeper exploration.
(Action for Viewer: Please use the District filter and select Hasbaya District.)
Step 3: The second zoom – Finding the Restaurant Gap
One town rises above the rest:
Fardis, Hasbaya District
High tourism demand (index: 10).
Low supply: few restaurants exist (5 restaurants), minimal competition.
No recent initiatives, meaning the opportunity remains untouched.
Visitors are already coming, but the market has not responded. This is exactly the type of gap a new restaurant should fill.
In Fardis, high demand, low competition, and authentic natural beauty come together, making it a place where La Table can truly belong and elevate the town’s charm. By moving from a national overview to a focused district analysis, the data revealed a location where potential and opportunity meet. But beyond numbers, choosing Fardis reflects vision, intuition, and respect for place.
Haytham runs a small grocery shop in Baabda. During Covid-19, his day started early as he opened his shop, cleaned the counter, and checked his phone to see who was sick today.
The street outside never really stopped. People passed through Baabda to go to Beirut, to work, to school, to hospitals and pharmacies. Every week, Haytham heard the same line: “My uncle got Covid.” “My neighbor tested positive.” “My coworker is now in isolation.”
For him, Covid-19 was not just news on TV. It was fewer workers, worried customers, and a quiet fear at home.
When we look at the data, Baabda has the highest number of recorded Covid-19 cases of all districts in Lebanon. It has more cases than Matn, and more than all the other districts on the chart.
This fits what people in Baabda felt every day. When one busy district has so many cases:
Shops and offices lose staff because people keep getting sick.
Families have to stay home, miss work, and take care of each other.
Clinics and hospitals see more patients and more pressure.
Other districts had fewer cases and a lighter daily impact. So even though Covid-19 hit all of Lebanon, it did not hit every place in the same way.
This difference is important. If we treat all districts as if they are the same, we may plan in the wrong way. However, if we know that places like Baabda had many more cases, we can prepare better for the next health crisis. For busy areas like Baabda, this could mean:
More testing and vaccination points.
Extra support for hospitals and clinics.
Clear messages and reminders in places where many people pass and meet.
This story is not only about one district at the top of a list. It is about using simple data to see where life was hardest, and making sure that next time, these places get the help they need faster.
For people like Haytham, that could mean fewer worries, fewer sick calls, and a community that feels ready, not alone.
Livestock is the backbone of Somaliland’s rural economy. For many households, especially in pastoral and agropastoral regions, selling animals is the primary source of income. But who participates in the market? How much do they earn? And who makes the key decisions inside the household?
To answer these questions, we analyzed survey data from small ruminant producers across three livelihood zones: Hawd Pastoral, Togdheer Agropastoral, and West Golis Pastoral. The goal was to understand market participation, decision-making, and household revenue patterns.
1. What animals are households keeping?
The first visualization compares shoats—sheep and goats—to all other animals (camels, cattle, chickens, and donkeys). The results are striking:
🟦 Shoats account for over 95% of all animals kept 🟪 All other animals combined barely make up 5%.
This confirms that the livestock economy is overwhelmingly based on small ruminants. Any intervention, pricing policy, or market support should therefore prioritize shoats.
Lebanon’s landscape is full of cultural, historical, and natural assets, yet tourism development across the country remains uneven. Using the UNDP Tourism Readiness dataset (1,136 towns across 25 districts), this analysis uncovers where Lebanon’s hidden tourism opportunities are and which regions lack the infrastructure to support them.
Tourism Potential Exists, But Not All Towns Are Developed
To understand tourism readiness, every town can be classified into one of four groups:
Developed Potential: Towns with both potential and infrastructure
Untapped Potential: Towns with potential but no infrastructure
Infrastructure Only: Towns with infrastructure but no identified potential
Low Potential: Towns with neither
Right away, a key insight emerges:
A considerable number of Lebanese towns have meaningful tourism potential but lack the infrastructure required to activate it.
This simple breakdown highlights that tourism potential is widespread across the country, but not always supported by visitor services such as guest houses, cafés, or restaurants.
Some areas have much larger gaps than others
When looking at infrastructure gaps by area, the differences become clearer. Some districts have potential but very little tourism infrastructure to go with it.
In particular,
Beqaa
Hermel
Marjeyoun
show some of the highest gap rates. These places have attractions and natural assets, but not enough facilities to support tourism activity. Meanwhile, districts like Mount Lebanon and Byblos are more developed and have infrastructure that aligns better with their tourism activity.
This chart makes it easier to see which areas are lagging behind and where new investment could make a real difference.
What this means for tourism planning
Putting the insights together, a simple pattern appears:
Many towns across Lebanon do have tourism potential
But a noticeable share of them don’t have the infrastructure to support visitors
The largest gaps show up in specific districts, not everywhere
Improving basic services in these places could unlock new opportunities
Instead of focusing only on areas that are already popular, these findings suggest that Lebanon has several underdeveloped regions that could become strong tourism spots if they receive proper attention.
Conclusion
Lebanon already has the natural and cultural foundations for tourism. The challenge isn’t a lack of potential, it’s the uneven distribution of infrastructure.
By identifying where the gaps are, the data gives a clear starting point for planners, municipalities, and anyone interested in local development. Investing in infrastructure in high-potential but underserved towns could help bring more balance to Lebanon’s tourism map and open opportunities in regions that are currently overlooked.
Sierra Leone is a small West African nation with a population of roughly 8 million people. Rich in natural beauty, cultural energy, and abundant resources. But behind the country’s potential lies a familiar struggle: an economy still leaning too heavily on a single sector. Agriculture has long been the backbone of national productivity, while mining, industry, and services often struggle to keep pace.
This structural imbalance has made Sierra Leone vulnerable, and nowhere was this more visible than in 2015, when the dual shocks of the Ebola outbreak and a collapse in global iron ore prices sent the economy into a tailspin. So, what exactly is going on beneath the surface? And what would it take to build a more resilient and diverse economy?
Agriculture consistently accounts for 50-63% of the GDP, leaving the nation vulnerable whenever farming seasons fail, prices fluctuate, or crises occur.
Industry is the most unstable sector, swinging wildly between 5% and 22%. And in 2015, it hit its lowest point, just 5% due to:
The Ebola outbreak froze movement and production.
A crash in global iron ore prices is forcing mining operations to shut down.
This year alone has exposed how dependent Sierra Leone’s industrial sector is on external forces.
Hovering between 28–36%, the services sector has been steady but sluggish, unable to compensate for weaknesses elsewhere. Together, these patterns reveal an economy that struggles to withstand shocks because it lacks balance.
A Way Forward: Building a Diversified Economy
If Sierra Leone wants long-term stability, it must diversify, plain and simple. That means:
Strengthening industry
Modernizing agriculture with value addition
Expanding services and digital innovation
The proposed solutions are supported by real-world programs in Sierra Leone, confirming their credibility and feasibility.
World Bank – Sierra Leone Economic Diversification Project
Supports economic diversification beyond agriculture and mining.
Strengthens SMEs, enhances value addition, and improves market access.
Confirms agro-processing, service expansion, and SME support as national priorities.
International Labour Organization – Opportunity Salone Programme
Promotes youth entrepreneurship and job creation.
Supports sustainable SME models and value chain development.
Validates the focus on integrating agriculture with industry.
The solutions are evidence-based, nationally aligned, partner-friendly, and feasible. But the question remains: how can Sierra Leone leverage these programs and data insights to fully unlock its economic potential?
Lebanon’s landscape is full of cultural, historical, and natural assets, yet tourism development across the country remains uneven. Using the UNDP Tourism Readiness dataset (1,136 towns across 25 districts), this analysis uncovers where Lebanon’s hidden tourism opportunities are and which regions lack the infrastructure to support them.
