The famous correlation between size and power doesn’t match Lebanon’s situation. Despite being a small Mediterranean country, Lebanon has had its huge share of political, social, and demographic changes.

The previous two decades, disguised as a growth era post the world war, held several life-changing events for Lebanon. Hence altering its demographics on different levels. The following is an overall view on Lebanon’s demographic standing since 1999 up till 2021.

Overview:The Overview sheet allows a surface navigation into the data, by examining the total births, deaths, marriages, and divorces by each governorate and over the span of two decades.

Births and Deaths

Lebanon population has been in an increasing state, as births have been 4x more than deaths over the past 20 years.
It is noticeable that men have the higher share in terms of births, but also hold this state in terms of deaths too.
As it concerns the governorates, births are at their highest in rural or economically disadvantages areas, such as South and North of Lebanon. This goes back to the cultural habits certain areas, where marrying young and having many children is viewed as a favorable act.
Similarly speaking, death’s highest share exists in the same regions. This is due to the lack of proper medical access that are usually condensed in cities. What also might be a factor is the political unrest that the mentioned areas usually witness, which sometimes causes fatalities unfortunately. That is why Beirut (the capital) holds the lowest share of deaths due to the immediate access to more advanced medical facilities.

Time wise, deaths usually peak during the summer season worldwide, due to drowning and more car accidents. Another extremely undercover cause is the high temperature that highly increases the occurrence of heart attacks. This is also visible in Lebanon.

However, the Beirut Blast on the 4th of August and the high numbers of COVID-19 infections increased the number of deaths as well.

Beirut Blast
With its wide range of effect, the Beirut Blast incurred 250 deaths and over 6,000 injuries, with some of them leading to more deaths in the following years.

The fast spread of COVID-19 also had a huge effect upon the death rates in Lebanon. At the time of lock-downs, we can see the decrease of death cases by thousands, only to severely increase once the restrictions are lifted (such as in December).

Marriages and Divorces

Concerning marriages, it is evident that both the South and North of Lebanon score the highest. This is backed up by the global phenomenon of marriages being more in rural/ economically disadvantaged areas. Moreover, the cultural values of the mentioned areas have an effect, in which marrying at a young age is more common than in Beirut (the capital). Sequentially, divorces in the South and North of Lebanon is also higher than other governorates. As for Beirut, it holds the least amount of marriages and divorces in Lebanon. A study conducted by LABOUR FORCE in Lebanon revealed that the mean age for marriage in Beirut was 26.9 and 31.1 for women and men consequently. Compared to the rest of Lebanon, the mean age of marriage for men was 25.6 and 30.7 for women. Ironically, the same reasons for high rate of marriages (marrying young, economic hardship) cause high rates of divorces in the future.

Divorce to Marriage Ratio:
Digging further however, inspecting the ratio of divorces to marriages would be a good indicator of the cultural values found in each governorate, given that the numbers alone are relative and not proportional. Although having the lowest numbers of marriages and divorces as mentioned above, Beirut holds the highest ratio of divorces to marriages. Several factors might be considered, such as the absence of a uniformed set of cultural values in the capital, along-side the integration of women in the job market. As it concerns Beirut, 24.5% of the households where headed by women (75.5% by men). Considering the rest of Lebanon however, the rate of households headed by women decreases to 18.5% percent.
Another interesting phenomenon to inspect in the graph is that Mount Lebanon holds the lowest ratio of divorces to marriages, due to religious constraints in that area, which makes divorce a harder process.

Seasonality of marriages:
As it is common worldwide, marriages are seasonal events that usually prevail in the summer season. Similarly, for Lebanon, a spike of marriages occurs during the summer (Q2-Q3).
• Inspecting the year 2020 shows a low marriages rate due to quarantine, but then a steep rise in the slope once the lock-down measures were relaxed. This also explains the aspect that the Lebanese people heavily spoke about at that time, feeling that marriages are heavily increasing. In fact, it was due to the prevention applied by the government, which led to the occurrence of many marriages at the same time.
Feel free to navigate through the dashboard to inspect any aspect that interests you