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:
49.74% of Lebanese towns have no local resources nor nearby healthcare.
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.
Akkar, North Lebanon, Baalbek-Hermel, and Bekaa glow in urgent shades of red.
Beirut and Mount Lebanon rest confidently in green.
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
Mobile clinics traveling weekly into remote towns.
Telehealth services connecting residents with doctors online.
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
Expanding rural Primary Healthcare Centers (PHCs) in governorates painted red in the danger map.
Incentivizing private and nonprofit partnerships to open satellite clinics.
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
Lebanon’s healthcare inequality is regional and predictable, not accidental.
Rural northern and eastern regions are in critical danger, lacking both local and nearby care.
Nearly half of Lebanese towns face severe accessibility barriers.
The Solution
Deploy mobile and telehealth clinics immediately to stabilize high-danger governorates.
Invest in long-term PHC expansion to ensure durable access.
Integrate transportation and healthcare planning, recognizing that distance is often deadlier than disease.
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.”
Back in 2020, walking through Beirut felt different. The city that once overflowed with tourists, weekend travelers, and the constant shuffle of suitcase wheels had fallen unnervingly quiet. Streets that were normally alive with hotel valets, café chatter, and late-night crowds echoed instead with a stillness that was impossible to ignore. That silence was more than a mood—it was data waiting to be understood.
In this visualization, I retrace monthly hotel occupancy rates in Beirut from 2011 to the first half of 2020. For nearly a decade, the line moved in recognizable waves—seasonal peaks, predictable dips, and fluctuations shaped by politics, tourism cycles, and local instability. Despite everything Lebanon had endured, the hospitality sector kept finding its rhythm again.
But as the animation approaches late 2019 and early 2020, something shifts. The familiar pattern fractures. The line doesn’t simply decline—it collapses.
Watching the animation month by month feels almost like watching Beirut lose its breath in real time. In January 2020, occupancy was already strained. By March and April, the numbers didn’t just dip—they plummeted to historic lows. The hotels that once hosted conferences, weddings, and tourists from across the world were suddenly empty.
To make the scale of this collapse clearer, I use a second visualization: the year-over-year (YoY) change. For years, even amid disruptions, positive and negative bars balanced each other out—losses were recoverable, gains still appeared. But in 2019 and especially 2020, the bars plunge into deep negative territory. Some months show declines of more than 70%, marking the most severe contraction the sector had ever experienced.
This wasn’t a gradual decline. It was a cliff.
The causes were layered: the economic crisis accelerating through 2019, the nationwide protests, the currency collapse, and the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. All these forces converged so quickly that a sector built over decades unraveled in mere weeks.
Seen animated, the data becomes a visual narrative of this unraveling—the rhythm of a city interrupted, its resilience stretched past its breaking point.
Big Idea:
What happened in 2020 was not a slowdown: it was a breaking point. The collapse of Beirut’s hotel occupancy reflects a sector that had survived everything until several crises finally hit at once. The data makes one message clear: when pressure builds over years, failure can arrive all at once, and without warning. Recovery has fortunately already begun, which makes it essential for policymakers to strengthen early-warning systems and support mechanisms so that the hospitality sector can withstand future shocks more effectively.
Unequal Support: When Small Numbers Hide Real Lives
This is Jane, a 27-year-old Ethiopian domestic worker living in Akkar.
Last month, when she got sick, she had no access to community aid, legal protection, or medical support.
She waited four days before anyone could help her—not because support didn’t exist, but because in Akkar there are too few immigrant workers to be considered a priority.
Jane’s struggle is not personal—it’s structural.
Immigrant workers in Lebanon are not distributed evenly across the country, and when population numbers are small, support systems disappear.
Small communities become invisible, unheard, and unprotected.
Below is the distribution of immigrant workers across Lebanon by nationality and governorate.
Everything in blue represents a community with fewer than 10,000 workers, meaning low visibility and often no access to essential support.
While Beirut hosts extremely large populations — for example 38,642 workers labeled “Other Nationalities” and 25,452 Ethiopians—governorates like Akkar host only 266 Ethiopians and 127 Bangladeshis.
Yet behind every small number is a real human life.
If We Do Nothing
If nothing changes, workers like Jane will continue to suffer in silence.
Low-population regions will remain overlooked, and inequality will deepen — not because help doesn’t exist, but because help isn’t distributed fairly.
What Can We Do?
Solution 1—Mobile Clinics
Mobile clinics are medical vans that travel to underserved regions to deliver basic healthcare.
They bring support to people who cannot safely or affordably reach Beirut.
During COVID-19, NGOs in Lebanon successfully used mobile medical units to reach remote areas — proving that mobility overcomes geographic inequality.
Solution 2—Rotating Outreach Teams
Teams of legal advisors, translators, and social workers rotate across governorates weekly, providing education, protection, and emergency help.
This approach already works in Jordan, where outreach teams support Syrian refugees in dispersed rural camps without needing permanent offices.
Solution 3—Minimum-Support Policies
A national guarantee ensuring every governorate receives a basic level of support, regardless of population size.
Just as Lebanon provides schools, electricity, and hospitals to small villages, immigrant workers deserve equal dignity and safety.
Findings & Recommendation
Support should not depend on population size — dignity must be universal.
Lebanon should adopt minimum-support policies, expand mobile and rotating services, and ensure that no worker is invisible.
Electricity is supposed to be invisible: you flip a switch and get light. In Lebanon, it’s something you plan your whole day around.
Most residents now live with two parallel systems in their heads: EDL hours and generator hours. You learn which appliances you’re allowed to use at 2 pm versus 2 am, when to rush a shower, when to switch off the AC because you’re scared of the next bill. Behind every meter, there’s a family trying to stretch one salary across food, rent, school, and an electricity bill that never really feels under control.
Situational Analysis — What people are living inside
On paper, almost every home in Lebanon is connected to electricity. Urban households report virtually no physical disconnection from the grid, and rural areas are close behind.
In reality, the public utility, EDL, only manages to cover around two-thirds of national demand; the rest is picked up by private diesel generators at much higher prices.
Tariffs on the public grid stayed frozen for decades while fuel costs and the lira’s collapse pushed the real cost of each kilowatt-hour far above what people are billed, leaving EDL dependent on large state subsidies and struggling to offer 24/7 power. Families respond the only way they can, by constantly switching between EDL and generators, trimming usage where possible, and sacrificing comfort during heat waves and cold snaps.
Almost Everyone Lives with a Generator
It is very rare in Lebanon to find a building that relies only on EDL. Across Beirut, Mount Lebanon, the North and the South, almost 90% of all residents now live in buildings that have a generator contract.
For a typical family, that doesn’t just mean backup power; it means a second bill, a second set of rules, and a constant low-level anxiety about fuel prices, ampere limits, and surprise increases.
Where you live and how you’re supplied decide your bill
Generator users pay the most, and some regions are hit harder than others. Private-generator buildings in Mount Lebanon show the highest monthly bills, while households relying only on EDL pay noticeably less for similar basic needs. There are tough choices to make: parents deciding whether to keep the heater on for one more hour, or students studying under dimmer lights to save a little this month.
Same consumption, very different bills
Actual bills are well above the simple baseline almost everywhere. Even when buildings use roughly the same amount of electricity, generator users sit higher on the chart than EDL users. Two families living in similar-sized apartments, using similar appliances, can end the month with completely different bills, just because one building relies more on diesel. The system doesn’t only charge you for how much you use; it charges you for how broken your supply chain is.
Old buildings and weak envelopes quietly punish people
Older, poorly insulated residential buildings come with the highest bills. Poor or average insulation traps heat and cold in all the wrong ways, forcing families to run AC units, space heaters, and dehumidifiers longer just to reach a basic level of comfort. Newer or better-insulated buildings show noticeably lower bills, but most of the housing stock doesn’t fall into the good category.
Energy storage (batteries) helps residents survive outages and shift some usage, but it only reduces the bill a little bit—it doesn’t fix leaky windows, thin walls, or a climate that’s getting more extreme. People are effectively paying a penalty for living in older buildings they rarely had the power to choose or upgrade.
Call for action
What we found is pretty clear: residents in Mount Lebanon are billed the highest for roughly the same comfort, but no region is really okay. Whether it’s Beirut, the North, the South, or Mount Lebanon, most households are dealing with the same mix of unstable EDL hours, heavy generator reliance, and buildings that leak heat and cool air. The patterns in the data all point to the same thing: your bill is shaped more by where you live and how your building is supplied than by how careful you are with turning things off.
So, here’s the ask. At home, focus on the wins you actually control. Run heavy loads in EDL hours, when possible, keep ACs and heaters serviced, and seal the obvious leaks around windows and doors. In your building, don’t carry it alone, coordinate with neighbors or the committee to push for clearer generator terms and small shared upgrades instead of random individual fixes. At a wider level, we should start by helping the people who are hurting the most: families in older, generator-dependent buildings in every region, with support to improve their homes and with fairer electricity prices. The data shows exactly who is paying the highest bills, so we can stop acting like everyone is affected in the same way.
In the dynamic world of economics, trade balances play a pivotal role in determining a country’s financial health. This visualization offers a clear and concise representation of Lebanon’s trade situation over the recent years, focusing on the comparison between the exports and imports of goods and services as a percentage of GDP.
Context:
Lebanon, a country with a rich trading history, has faced various economic challenges exacerbated by political instability and global market fluctuations. Understanding the trade trends is crucial for policy-makers, businesses, and academicians to assess the country’s economic resilience and to strategize for future growth.
These pie charts are a visual summary of the economic challenges faced by Lebanon in terms of trade. They underscore the need for strategic planning and diversified economic reform to build a more balanced and self-sufficient economic structure.
In 2019, the pie chart illustrates that imports considerably outweighed exports, indicating a trade deficit. This imbalance suggests that the country was consuming more than it was producing for external markets.
2020 shows a slight shift with the reduction in imports and a marginal increase in exports. This change could be indicative of various factors, such as a change in economic policy, a response to external economic pressures, or the impact of the global events of that year, like the COVID-19 pandemic.
By 2021, the gap between imports and exports continues to persist, although there’s a noticeable improvement in the trade balance, with exports comprising a larger section of the pie.
Problem:
Lebanon is grappling with a trade deficit.
Solutions:
1- Diversification of Exports: Investing in diverse sectors to increase the range of goods and services for export.
2- Improving Domestic Production: Enhancing the quality and quantity of domestic production to reduce reliance on imports.
3- Trade Agreements: Entering into new trade agreements that favor Lebanese exports or revising existing ones to improve trade terms.
After working on these strategies developing these ideas, and through careful analysis and responsive policymaking, Lebanon can work towards a future where its exports and imports are in a healthier balance.
