by gwk03 | Nov 21, 2025 | Dashboard, Uncategorized
How often do you crash into potholes and hope that your car is still fine ?
We encounter them daily—the potholes, the fissures, the declining condition of Lebanon’s streets. It’s a common grievance. However, is the weight of this crisis distributed fairly throughout the nation? The anecdotal evidence indicates it’s poor everywhere, but the data uncovers a more concerning and systemic narrative of inequality
Problem Highlight
- We hear about bad roads and potholes everywhere in Lebanon
- One big problem is the condition of the roads that is immensely different in districts compared to others .
- Is the crisis the same everywhere? The data was showing the truth
The Evidence
To
transcend anecdotes, we
illustrated the
information regarding road conditions
throughout Lebanon. The
outcome presents a
distinct and
disquieting image.
This visual representation serves as a diagnostic instrument. Every point indicates the road status in a particular region, and its location narrates a tale:
The more to the right a point is, the poorer the road conditions.
The figure linked to the point precisely measures “how severe” the circumstances are
Revelation: The Story is in the Distance
The most startling realization is not only that some points are on the right, but also how far apart they are.
The chart’s arrows draw attention to the stark contrast between the areas with the best and worst maintenance. The disparity in infrastructure upkeep and care that exists in the real world is directly reflected in this physical distance on the chart. We may infer a history of unequal budget allocation and focus from the data, which shows an uneven distribution of the problem.
Clearly , Akkar is the center of this issue
Its data points are pushed as far to the right as possible, indicating that this area is most affected by the collapse of the infrastructure.
Why This Matters: The Human Impact
How does it affect citizens’ daily life ?
More traffic jams
More accidents
Increased danger in general
More floods
Inaccessible areas
Car damage
This goes beyond uncomfortable car journeys. The deterioration of road infrastructure leads to significant human and economic impacts:
- Economic Expense: Increased traffic congestion and notable vehicle damage raise the expenses of living and business.
- Public Safety: Bad roads result in a higher number of accidents and greater risk for every individual.
- Social Isolation: Remote regions may become disconnected from necessary services, job opportunities, and social networks
The Way Ahead: A Solution Informed by Data
So, what steps should we take next? This information offers a straightforward, practical framework for resolving the issue.
The approach is simple:
Focus on Action: Begin maintenance and budget distribution in the sectors where the dots are furthest to the right—the areas in the most urgent condition.
Staged Recovery: Slowly allocate resources to the more intact regions, developing a systematic, staged strategy according to level of damage
The goal is to transform data into a tool for decision-making. We now have the evidence to move from nearly no clue on what was happening to a strategic, plan for Lebanon’s road network.
by zct01 | Nov 21, 2025 | Uncategorized
A Morning in Akkar
Somewhere in the hills of Akkar, a mother wakes before dawn. Her son is burning with fever, his tiny chest rising in short, frightened breaths.
She wraps him in a blanket, steps outside and faces the same impossible truth every family in her town lives with:
There is no clinic here.
No doctor.
No nearby care.
The closest medical help is more than an hour away—if roads are clear, if transportation can be found, if nothing goes wrong. For her, and for nearly half of Lebanon’s towns, simple illnesses can become life-threatening journeys. It is not just a healthcare issue, It is a daily, silent tragedy that shapes entire lives.
What the Data Shows but the Country Ignores
The visuals map this tragedy with painful clarity.
In the bar chart:
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49.74% of Lebanese towns have no local resources nor nearby healthcare.
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17.08% have no local facilities but can sometimes reach distant care.
Only 33.19% enjoy the basic dignity of accessible treatment.
The map shows Lebanon carved into colors that reveal the geography of abandonment.
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Akkar, North Lebanon, Baalbek-Hermel, and Bekaa glow in urgent shades of red.
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Beirut and Mount Lebanon rest confidently in green.
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Though South Lebanon contains the highest danger percentage, it is covered with governorates that contain abundant amount of medical facilities and resources.
The visuals prove what families in rural regions already know: healthcare access in Lebanon is not just unequal—it is deeply, structurally unfair.
The danger zones are not random, they follow the borders of poverty, neglect, and distance.
A Country at a Crossroads
Yet Lebanon is not without hope. Around the world—and even within its own borders—innovative models show that remote and underserved communities can receive consistent care. The country stands at a crossroads where solutions are known, feasible, and within reach.
Lebanon can choose a future where no mother must gamble with her child’s life because of distance.
That future begins with a hybrid healthcare access model designed for real Lebanese terrain, real Lebanese families, and real Lebanese limitations.
Building the Path Forward
The path unfolds in two phases—immediate relief and lasting transformation.
Immediate Relief
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Mobile clinics traveling weekly into remote towns.
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Telehealth services connecting residents with doctors online.
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Community health workers offering first aid, monitoring chronic diseases, and stabilizing emergencies.
These solutions bring healthcare to the people, rather than asking the people to chase it.
Long-Term Transformation
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Expanding rural Primary Healthcare Centers (PHCs) in governorates painted red in the danger map.
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Incentivizing private and nonprofit partnerships to open satellite clinics.
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Improving transportation links so that even without a local clinic, emergency care is reachable.
This approach does not just fill gaps, it builds a system where every town becomes medically reachable, no matter how far, no matter how rural.
Why This Will Work
Proof already exists.
Organizations like MSF, the Lebanese Red Cross, and multiple NGOs have successfully delivered mobile and remote care across Lebanon’s hardest-to-reach regions. Telehealth has grown worldwide, saving millions in rural communities and the data that drives these charts, maps, and analyses pinpoint exactly where interventions must be prioritized.
The strategy aligns with Lebanon’s national health vision and mirrors international best practices in countries with similar geography and instability.
It is not theory.
It is tested, validated, and realistic.
Beyond the Diagnosis
The visuals do not simply highlight shortages, they illuminate where change must begin.
The Truth
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Lebanon’s healthcare inequality is regional and predictable, not accidental.
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Rural northern and eastern regions are in critical danger, lacking both local and nearby care.
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Nearly half of Lebanese towns face severe accessibility barriers.
The Solution
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Deploy mobile and telehealth clinics immediately to stabilize high-danger governorates.
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Invest in long-term PHC expansion to ensure durable access.
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Integrate transportation and healthcare planning, recognizing that distance is often deadlier than disease.
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Maintain data-driven monitoring to continuously reallocate resources to evolving needs.
If Lebanon acts now and not later, the red zones can fade. Families can breathe easier. Lives can be saved.
A Different Dawn
One day, perhaps, a child in Akkar will still wake before dawn—but instead of gasping for breath, he will leap from bed to greet a new school day. His mother will no longer fear the distance to care.
Because care will finally be within reach. Because the map will no longer define who survives and who struggles. Because Lebanon will have remembered its forgotten towns.
That is the story the data tells. That is the story this country can still rewrite.
“We are alive the most when we are faced with adversity like no other.”
by mms90 | Nov 21, 2025 | Uncategorized, Visualization
Farid’s weekly trip from Yammoune shows how distance can stand between a patient and lifesaving care.
“For many in rural Lebanon, the first battle isn’t the illness—it’s the road.”
Farid’s weekly journey
Farid lives in Yammoune, a mountain village in the Beqaa (Baalbek District). He travels to the nearest hospital about 28 km away, a trip that takes roughly 40–45 minutes—and he does this two to three times a week for cancer treatment. The drive, the weather, and the rough roads make every visit heavy and exhausting
The geography problem
Rural communities in Lebanon face long distances to care, limited transport options, and winter closures on mountain roads. When the nearest hospital is far, time lost on the road can mean care delayed, especially for urgent cases like chemotherapy, dialysis, emergencies, or childbirth.
“Every kilometer matter, especially when minutes do too.”
Why nearby hospitals matter
- Faster treatment: Shorter trips mean earlier interventions and fewer missed appointments.
- Less strain on families: Reduced travel costs and stress for caregivers.
- Health equity: Brings rural patients closer to the standard of care found in cities.
- System resilience: Local facilities ease congestion at major urban hospitals.
What we can do
- Invest in satellite oncology units and urgent care centers in rural hubs.
- Strengthen referral networks so stabilization happens locally before transfers.
- Mobile clinics & telehealth to bridge gaps while facilities are built.
- Reliable transport support (subsidized rides/ambulances) for critical patients.
- Data-driven planning to prioritize locations with the highest access gaps.
A human ask
Farid’s story is not unique. For patients like him, a nearby hospital isn’t just convenience, it’s dignity, energy, and a real chance to keep fighting.
by jjh30 | Nov 21, 2025 | Uncategorized
Tourism has always been one of Lebanon’s brightest sectors, bringing life, movement, and opportunity to towns across the country. But when we look closely at where this activity is actually happening, an important pattern becomes clear: tourism is not spread evenly. It is concentrated intensely in just a handful of towns. And with that concentration comes one of Lebanon’s biggest hidden challenges: environmental pressure.
Restaurants, cafés, and hotels create jobs, attract visitors, and fuel local economies, but they also generate large amounts of waste, rely heavily on single-use plastics, and demand significant water and electricity. When these establishments cluster together in small areas, the strain on municipal systems becomes visible faster than the benefits.
To understand this pressure, we visualized the distribution of tourism establishments across the top 10 tourism towns in Lebanon. The result was striking. Two towns, Aabbesiyi and Baalbek stood far above the rest.
Aabbesiyi hosts 30 restaurants, 25 cafés, and 4 hotels. Baalbek hosts 39 restaurants, 10 cafés, and 2 hotels. Together, they make up 55% of all tourism establishments among the top towns.
This isn’t a small detail. This is the story.
These two towns carry more tourism activity, more food and packaging waste, more daily electricity and water consumption, and more visitor movement than anywhere else. And because the environmental impact is highest where the activity is highest, this concentration creates an opportunity that Lebanon has never fully used: beginning sustainability efforts where they matter most.
Instead of trying to build a national sustainability plan all at once, we can start with a focused, practical approach. Aabbesiyi and Baalbek are ideal places to pilot a Sustainable Tourism Starter Program, a coordinated effort that brings together cafés, restaurants, hotels, municipalities, and visitors under a simple goal: reducing the environmental footprint of the tourism experience.
Why start here?
Because here, the impact is immediate.
Because here, businesses are clustered close enough to benefit from shared guidelines and joint awareness efforts.
Because here, improvements don’t just make environmental sense, they make social and economic sense too.
Global sustainable tourism frameworks follow the same principle: begin where tourism activity is heaviest. It creates quicker results, easier monitoring, and a clearer path for scaling what works. And both Aabbesiyi and Baalbek already have something many towns lack: active business communities, strong visibility, and a steady visitor flow that makes sustainability initiatives more likely to succeed.
From shared sustainability guidelines to town-level branding like “Green Aabbesiyi” and “Eco-Baalbek,” these hubs can become the first Lebanese destinations to embrace environmental responsibility as part of their identity. With support from NGOs, municipal authorities, schools, and local partners, the program can grow beyond awareness campaigns into a committed, long-term approach to managing waste, water, energy, and visitor behavior. And once we see the impact, once the model proves itself, the same practices can be adopted by other towns, one step at a time.
Our visualization points to one undeniable truth: not all tourism towns carry the same environmental weight. Turning this insight into action gives Lebanon a real chance to move toward a greener tourism future, starting exactly where impact will be felt most.
by pza02 | Nov 21, 2025 | Uncategorized
Have you ever had a phone call cut at the worst possible moment?
Dropped calls feel random to users, but for network engineers they follow clear patterns.
This visualization shows how phone call quality changes by cell tower and hour of the day, helping identify when and where calls are most likely to drop.
What does this chart show?
The heatmap below displays the percentage of attempted calls that were dropped.
Each row represents a cell tower, and each column represents an hour of the day.
Light colors mean few or no dropped calls.
Darker red cells represent higher dropped call percentages.
Key Insights
At first glance, most of the grid is calm — meaning many towers perform well most of the time.
But a few patterns immediately stand out:
• Leaffson tower shows spikes just after midnight
• Eastower also shows higher dropped calls around midnight
• GLU tower has a strong spike around 6 AM
These hotspots suggest that dropped calls are not random, but concentrated in certain places and times.
Why This Matters
Instead of assuming the network is bad everywhere, this visualization helps show exactly where improvements should be prioritized.
By focusing on a small number of tower–hour combinations, the telecom operator could significantly improve customer experience without redesigning the entire network.
by cvs02 | Nov 21, 2025 | Dashboard, Uncategorized, Visualization
Teta Salma lives in a small village in the Hermel District. The nearest clinic is far from her home and opens on an unpredictable schedule, so routine tests are rarely part of her life. She often feels tired but assumes it is simply age catching up with her. During a visit to her daughter in Mount Lebanon, she took her to a nearby medical center for a simple checkup. That day she learned she had diabetes. The condition had been part of her life for years. It had only been discovered because she finally had access.
Her experience reflects something that appears across Lebanon when we look at the data. Using the Health Status 2023 and Health Resources 2023 datasets from PKGCube, I compared reported chronic disease cases with the number of healthcare facilities available in each governorate and district. I combined hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes into one chronic disease measure. I then compared these counts with the number of care centers and first aid centers in each region:
The visualization revealed a clear pattern: Regions with stronger reach and more places to get a routine check reported higher counts of chronic disease. Akkar stands out with 390 chronic disease cases and 126 healthcare facilities. Mount Lebanon and Baalbek Hermel show a similar alignment. Areas with limited reach, such as Hermel or the Western Beqaa, showed much lower numbers.
These lower numbers do not necessarily reflect lower illness. They reflect reduced visibility. When people cannot reach a clinic easily, fewer conditions are recorded and many remain unnoticed until symptoms become harder to ignore.
To understand how better reach affects health data, I looked at the experience of Thailand. The country expanded primary care and community screening through its Universal Health Coverage program. Once routine checks became easier to access, more cases of hypertension and diabetes were identified, especially in rural areas. Detection of hypertension increased from 48.9 percent in 2016 to 53.3 percent in 2019, and diabetes detection rose from 67.4 percent to 74.7 percent during the same period. These changes showed how wider access can reveal conditions that were present long before.
This is similar to what we see in Lebanon. When people have access, more of the country’s true chronic disease burden becomes visible. When access is limited, the data looks lighter than reality.
A practical next step for Lebanon is to expand routine screening in districts with fewer facilities. Mobile clinics, community testing days and partnerships with universities or NGOs can bring basic checks closer to the communities that need them. Improved digital record systems can also help track early diagnoses more accurately. Monitoring places like Hermel, Bsharri or the Western Beqaa can show if these efforts are working.
Healthcare access shapes what we know about people’s health. Strengthening that access gives families the chance to understand their conditions earlier and manage them with clarity. It also brings us back to people like Teta Salma. Her diabetes did not begin the day she was screened. It became visible because she finally reached a place where someone could help her.
Supporting more communities in this way can bring hidden conditions to light and build healthier lives across Lebanon.
