Unequal Burdens: Corruption’s Impacts on People with Intersectional Identities in Lebanon

This research was conducted under IFES’s Lebanon: Political Advocacy for Inclusive Reform (LePAIR) project, which focuses on strengthening intersectional networks to organize for political rights and to counter corruption, especially outside the capital, where marginalized groups do not have the same access to information and resources that can help them champion change. Civil society coalitions magnify prospects for change when women; people with disabilities; young people; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQI+) persons, and others take collective action and address the unique experiences of people with multiple marginalized identities.

LePAIR builds on the successes of IFES’s first intersectionality project in Lebanon, Identify, Interpret and Respond (IIR), which ran from mid-2018 to early 2022 and included the first intersectionality assessment conducted in Lebanon, Identity and Politics in Lebanon: Challenges and Opportunities for Coalition-Building and Inclusion. That project witnessed the October 17, 2019, revolution, when protestors took to the streets in response to a new tax, closely followed by an unprecedented economic collapse that resulted in more than 80 percent of Lebanese now living in poverty. The economic collapse partially contributed to a political crisis that came to a head in August 2020, when more than 250 people were killed in an explosion in Beirut’s port that immediately exposed official negligence and resulted in the government stepping down. Throughout these events, the Lebanese public, united under common cause despite diverse backgrounds, called clearly for change and an end to corruption.

The LePAIR project recognized those calls and was designed to support collective advocacy from an intersectional perspective, building knowledge around how corruption affects marginalized groups and using it to formulate new strategies. LePAIR also integrates perspectives from outside Beirut, including Tripoli, Akkar, Baalbek, Bekaa, and surrounding areas.

In February 2023, with logistical support from local and convening partners, IFES conducted eight focus group discussions (FGDs) and surveys with 127 individuals from the Tripoli/Akkar and Baalbek areas, including women, young people, people with disabilities, and participants representing intersectional identities. The FGDs were followed by 16 key informant interviews with stakeholders representing organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs), young people, anti-corruption groups, migrant and refugee rights groups, LGBTQI+ rights groups, the independent media, development groups, academia, and others. Using the same methodology as with the previous intersectionality assessment, research questions focused on corruption and its effects to measure how perceptions and experiences differ among marginalized groups and to identify any unique effects that people with intersectional identities encounter.

This Research Identified the following Key Findings:

• Political corruption and lack of government accountability rank as the most common forms of corruption in Lebanon according to respondents. Coupled with legal loopholes, the elite are the most likely to benefit from political corruption. People with intersectional identities are less likely to be part of the elite and therefore are disproportionately impacted by corruption.
• Administrative corruption, especially corruption in public service provision, disproportionately affects marginalized groups.
• Discriminatory legislation in Lebanon, although not corruption in itself, is often linked to creating the permissive environment for the inequality and injustice that enable corruption to flourish.
• Respondents link corruption in the media sector in Lebanon to enabling lack of transparency, misinformation, polarization, and limited government accountability.
• Respondents named persons with disabilities as the population most impacted by systemic corruption, followed by refugees migrants, LGBTQI+ people, older persons, and women.
• Respondents note that political corruption can both facilitate and hinder public participation, depending upon whether an individual has access to influential people or is able to pay bribes.

Introduction

IFES’s assessment methodology aims to identify opportunities for civil society organizations (CSOs) that represent specific groups to build coalitions, as well as vulnerabilities that might impact their civic and political participation. Assessments usually include a desk review, key informant interviews with government, media, and civil society leaders, FGDs with community members, and feedback loops with key stakeholders. The methodology is tailored to the country context and allows a focus on either a discrete identity, such as women refugees, or multiple groups, for instance, women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQI+ people, within a standardized framework. 

Intersectionality assessment reports offer programming options that make it possible for government, civil society, and international NGO implementers to put technical findings to direct use.

The research team contextualized this assessment, Unequal Burdens: Corruption’s Impacts on People with Intersectional Identities in Lebanon, for Lebanon and conducted it in collaboration with IFES’s local convening partners as well as CSO members of the Path Coalition, a network of over 40 local CSOs that was launched in 2019 during IFES’s previous phase of Identify, Inform, Respond (IIR) programming in Lebanon. The assessment sought to identify vulnerabilities that might impact specific marginalized groups’ civic and political participation and experiences of corruption. Based on the findings, it offers recommendations to combat forms of corruption that have outsized impacts on marginalized communities for international donors, national policymakers, civic organizations, and the media.

Data Sources

Desk Review
To inform the assessment methodology and mobilized instruments, the research team conducted a desk review
of relevant assessments, publications, and articles from local or international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs); the media; United Nations (UN) Treaty Committee reports; and other relevant global, regional, and
national reports. The team also used the desk review to triangulate or contextualize responses across the report.
Key resources are featured in footnoted references.

Pre-meeting Surveys and Interactive Focus Group Discussions
IFES’s participatory FGD methodology centers on participants’ voices and deliberations to ensure their meaningful participation. Facilitators gave space to participants to share, interpret, and examine their experiences through group and individual exercises. While IFES uses a standardized approach to each FGD, participants drive the conversation.

This assessment generated broader qualitative data through collaborative FGDs and participant-led analysis with the assessment’s target populations on corruption, access, voice, and leadership. In February 2023, IFES held a series of eight interactive FGDs and surveys with 127 individuals from different urban and rural communities of the North of Lebanon and the Bekaa. Four FGDs in each location included men
and women with and without disabilities. Participants were drawn from different age, wealth, educational, and religious strata. Before conducting the FGDs, IFES disseminated surveys to invited participants to collect their basic demographic information and insights on their opinions of political life in Lebanon.

Each FGD lasted three hours, during which participants worked in groups to identify and present key information on their political participation that they then analyzed, categorized, and prioritized in different ways. Participants also took open votes on opinions and priorities that were immediately tabulated by the FGD facilitators and visualized to guide discussions on the results. This methodology emboldened even the quietest participants to think for themselves and voice their opinions, as opposed to more traditional group interviews where a handful of participants may monopolize the conversation. The findings of the assessment are a rich mix of qualitative and quantitative findings around issues that Lebanese people of various identities face. The research team cross-tabulated the pre-FGD surveys with responses and votes taken during the FGDs to determine how individuals within certain demographic categories feel about their degree of civic and/or political participation in Lebanon.

The findings are not meant as statistical representations of the opinions of each identity group at large, given the relatively small sample size. However, they provide insights to understand how different identity groups, and those with multiple identities, perceive and experience corruption in their day-to-day lives.

Key Informant Interviews
The assessment sourced data from 16 purposively selected key informants (KIs). The key informant interviews focused on identifying predominant types of corruption affecting different population groups in Lebanon; the effects of corruption at the national, community, and individual levels; and opportunities to enhance the civic and political participation of individuals with intersectional identities. The key informant interviews were conducted following FGD data cleaning and analysis, so the research team capitalized on them to triangulate or validate some information collected directly from community members.

Stakeholders included representatives from organizations for people with disabilities (OPDs), anti-corruption groups, migrant or refugee rights groups, LGBTQI+ rights groups, independent media, development groups, and academia. Politically active youth and independent activists were also engaged and consulted.

Limitations

The research team anticipated and addressed several potential limitations:

• Informant anonymity: To ensure the highest level of confidentiality and to safeguard respondents, particularly in light of the sensitive nature of the thematic areas of this research, no quotations from KIs across the report are attributed. Furthermore, to ensure the comfort of community members, respondents were not asked to share their names at any phase of the primary data collection sessions.
• Participation of assistants to persons with disabilities: Some participants with disabilities were accompanied by personal assistants. Facilitators provided guidance at the beginning of each session, noting that it was designed to focus on the perspectives of persons with disabilities and asking assistants to refrain from interjecting. This guidance was effective, with one exception. In an FGD for women with disabilities, one participant’s father sought to dominate the conversation and direct her responses. The facilitators reminded him to refrain from participation, emphasizing that the objective of the session was to capture the perspectives of the participants, not their assistants or caregivers. None of his interjections are reflected in the findings.

In subsequent sessions, IFES took additional measures to enhance the effectiveness of participant-centered discussions and suggested that, ideally, assistants should be of the same gender as the participant. FGDs included visual content and instructions in plain language to help ease understanding for participants with intellectual disabilities. Still, some participants with intellectual disabilities sometimes appeared unsure about instructions but preferred not to seek assistance. Additionally, in certain instances, it was challenging to discern whether responses truly represented participants’ own opinions or were influenced by their assistants.

• Unclear references to political actors: Many quotations in this report include unclear references to political parties or actors (using “they” without specific identification). These references reflect the fact that 1)participants were either making blanket statements that applied to all political actors or did not want to create tensions within the larger group, or 2) IFES removed certain references to avoid polarizing the assessment findings and/or to protect respondents.
• Analysis focus on discrimination: The report places significant emphasis on the negative impacts of discrimination on marginalized groups. While the authors recognize that discrimination is not always linked directly to corruption, they adopted this focus in response to recurring concerns that community members raised during the research process, where they consistently identified discrimination as a critical factor that shapes their experiences of corruption and their overall wellbeing.

This decision reflects the authors’ commitment to capturing the broader context in which corruption occurs and to highlighting the intersectional nature of its impacts. The report acknowledges that discrimination often serves as a foundation for corruption, exacerbating existing inequities and vulnerabilities. By acknowledging and addressing discrimination, the report aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of challenges associated with corruption and to promote more effective anti-corruption strategies that consider the unique experiences of marginalized groups.

Sampling

Over a four-day period in February 2023, IFES conducted eight FGDs with 127 participants (52 percent females and 48 percent males) in the North of Lebanon (representation from rural and urban communities of Tripoli and Akkar) and the Bekaa (representation from rural and urban communities of Baalbek, West Bekaa, Chtaura, and surrounding regions). Participants were reached through several partner NGOs or independent activists working in those locations. They were selected randomly to represent varied age groups and educational backgrounds in order to collect a wider range of experiences and responses. In most cases, they were not affiliated with NGOs.

Figure 1 is a breakdown of FGD participants.

Age
While participants from all age groups joined the discussion sessions, most were young people. One-third (34 percent) were 18 to 24 years old, 29 percent were 25 to 34 years old, 19 percent were 35 to 44 years old, 12 percent were 45 to 54 years old, and 6 percent were 55 years old or above. The majority of the Bekaa participants without disabilities were young people, while ages varied across the remaining cohorts, as shown in Figure 2.

Religion
The predominant religion among FGD participants in the Bekaa was Shiite (60 percent), followed by Sunni (30percent), and 3 percent identified as Muslim without mentioning a sect. Another 5 percent did not identify as religious, and 2 percent declined to respond. In the North, the majority were Sunni (86 percent), with minimal proportions of Alawite (6 percent), Greek Orthodox (5 percent), and Maronite (1.5 percent). Another 1.5 percent declined to respond.

Disability
Participants with disabilities mostly reported having physical (53 percent) and auditory (29 percent) disabilities, followed by intellectual (8 percent) and visual (6 percent) disabilities. Two respondents had both visual and auditory disabilities, and one had physical, visual, and intellectual disabilities.

Education
The highest levels of education were recorded among FGD participants without disabilities, while the lower levels, including no formal education, were recorded among both women and men with disabilities in the Bekaa and the North. This finding can be considered indicative of the failure of Lebanon’s education system when it comes to accommodating students with disabilities. According to a Human Rights Watch report, [2] “while Law 220/2000 grants persons with disabilities the right to education […], in reality, the educational path of children with disabilities in Lebanon is strewn with logistical, social, and economic pitfalls that mean they often face a compromised school experience—if they can enroll at all.”

Economic Status
Nearly half of the sample of respondents (45 percent) reported not having enough money to cover their most basic needs. While this was the case for most cohorts, the finding was more common among groups with disabilities. The households of 25 percent of respondents had barely enough money to cover basic necessities, and another 25 percent had enough for basics but could not afford to save. Finally, 2 percent had savings, one respondent said her family could afford a comfortable lifestyle, and two respondents declined to respond. [3]

Marital Status
The highest proportion of respondents who had never been married were among the groups with no disabilities in the Bekaa. This was because most were young people between the ages of 18 and 24, and most were still pursuing higher education. Among groups with disabilities, while female and male respondents in the North and Bekaa were of similar ages and disability types, more women than men reported never having married. Married female respondents mostly had either a physical or an auditory disability. The research team integrated questions around this finding into key informant interviews with disability rights activists and representatives of OPDs. The section below describes the reasoning and perceptions gleaned from interviews.

Marriage and Disability

“At weddings, it is a very common cultural practice for people to tell single women, “Here’s to yours!” A woman with a disability will never hear that statement, simply because she is not seen as worthy of marriage. In fact, she is not even viewed as a woman to begin with.” (KI)

KIs confirmed that the identified discrepancy in marriage rates among women versus men with disabilities was an accurate reflection of the reality: it is “much easier” for men with disabilities to find spouses than women. The reasons provided, all rooted in patriarchic thought and hegemonic masculinities and femininities, included the following:

Many men – who often want to be “envied for their wives” – would not want to marry a woman with a disability “out of embarrassment,” particularly due to society’s discriminatory outlook toward people with disabilities.

Women are expected to have children and deal with all household affairs, and society generally does not believe that women with disabilities “can satisfy those requirements.” One KI commented that this attitude is “ridiculous because many are already doing housework in their parents’ homes.”

Women will more readily accept a man with a disability, particularly when they feel they are growing older and have not yet found a husband. “Sometimes, girls will just accept the first suitor for fear of ‘missing the train’.”

Some parents may refuse to allow daughters with disabilities to marry. This may be because they are “hiding her to avoid stigmatizing the family and ruining other daughters’ chances to find husbands,” or they do not want people to think that they are getting rid of a burden or that they are poor and need the dowry. One KI remarked that the parents of a woman with an auditory disability were shocked when she told them she wanted to get engaged; they did not think that she could lead a normal life or that anyone would want to marry her.

In general, all three KIs quoted above flagged the importance of raising awareness around this topic, both at the community level and, equally importantly, at the household level with the parents of individuals with disabilities.

2. Human Rights Watch, 2018. “I Would Like to Go to School: Barriers to Education for Children with Disabilities in Lebanon.”

3. One man and one woman (or 6 percent of each cohort) in the North with no disabilities declined to respond.

Lebanon, once celebrated for its cultural vibrancy and economic prosperity, now grapples with embedded corruption and dire prospects for reform. As the country struggled to rebuild in the aftermath of the 1975–1990 Civil War, political power brokers illicitly amassed wealth and influence. Corruption became institutionalized, permeating every facet of Lebanese society from the highest echelons of government to the daily dealings of ordinary citizens.

Over the years, politicians have enriched themselves through embezzlement, nepotism, and cronyism, and many businesses have thrived on contracts and deals with no transparency. The judiciary has become increasingly susceptible to political pressures, further entrenching a culture of impunity.

The consequences of this corruption have been devastating. The Lebanese economy, once a regional powerhouse dubbed “the Switzerland of the Middle East,” collapsed under the weight of unsustainable debt and mismanagement. Inflation has soared, plunging millions of Lebanese into poverty. Essential services, such as healthcare and education, have deteriorated, leaving citizens vulnerable and desperate.

In October 2019, people took to the streets in Lebanon, protesting a proposed tax on WhatsApp calls announced by the government. Over the next weeks, demonstrations grew exponentially into a nationwide movement to challenge the government’s failing economic policies and demand an end to corruption. The COVID-19 pandemic largely curtailed the demonstrations, arriving in Lebanon at a time when the economic crisis was deepening and making management of the health situation especially challenging. Then, the catastrophic Beirut Port Blast of August 2020 served as a stark reminder of the systemic failures that have plagued Lebanon.

Negligence and corruption were immediately linked to the disaster, which killed over 200 people, injured thousands, and caused widespread destruction. Despite immediate calls by the president and the interior minister for a transparent investigation of the blast, the investigation remains ongoing over three years later and has attracted significant criticism for lack of transparency and accountability.

In early 2020, in an attempt to rehabilitate its image with the public and to acquire much-needed international funding, the Lebanese government introduced a new anti-corruption law and began work on a new National Anti-Corruption Strategy. Law 175/2020, Combating Corruption in the Public Sector and the Establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), was adopted on May 14, 2020, after its publication in the Official Gazette. In September 2020, Parliament adopted Law 189/2020, the Financial Disclosure and the Punishment of Illicit Enrichment Law. In spite of the new laws, Transparency International’s 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index for Lebanon in 2022 was only 24 of 100 possible points (with a score of zero indicating extreme corruption and a score of 100 representing very clean governance). This score placed Lebanon 150th of 180 countries, a decline from its rank of 128th in 2012. Lebanon also scored well below the global average of 43 and the Middle East and North Africa regional average of 38. [4]

"Despite being created by a 2020 law, the six seats on the NACC were only filled by a cabinet decision in late January 2022. Mohammed Chamseddine, a researcher at Information International, previously told L’Orient-Le Jour that this delay showed a ‘lack of seriousness of the state in its will to fight corruption.’ ”

Richard Salame
L’Orient Today [5]

People with disabilities in Lebanon include:

• Older women, who are more likely to suffer worse health, have lower socio-economic status, be less educated, and live alone.
• Children and youth with disabilities.
• Palestinian and Syrian refugees, who may live in poor conditions, suffer from food insufficiency and insecurity, and lack access to health services.
• Older refugees, women and children, and poorer, uneducated refugees are at particular risk of exploitation and neglect.

Summarized from Combaz E. (2018, July 15). Situation of persons with disabilities in Lebanon
K4D Helpdesk Report, UK Department for International Development.

Lebanon’s legal framework systematizes gender inequality. For example:

• Fifteen personal status laws replicate sectarian and gendered discrimination for Lebanese women. Varying by sect, the laws are more disadvantageous for some Lebanese women than others, for example, regarding divorce (although divorce laws discriminate against women of all sects in different ways), custody, or inheritance.
• The Citizenship Law engenders discrimination by not permitting a woman to pass her citizenship to her foreign husband or children, although men can pass their citizenship to their foreign wives. There is also a fear that providing citizenship to the growing number of Syrian and Palestinian refugees in the country would tip the balance toward some religious groups. As a result, thousands of men and children in Lebanon are stateless, restricting their access to government services, education, employment, and inheritance.

Refugee Women in Lebanon:

Lebanon hosts over 1 million Syrian refugees and over 450,000 Palestine refugees. Many recent refugees from Syria are women and girls who may live without the protection of male relatives who were victims of the conflict. Women refugees face some of the most difficult conditions, including:

• High rates of social and sexual harassment or exploitation, domestic violence, and violence in camps and on the street.
• Child marriage, especially among Syrian refugee girls.
• Joblessness or access only to menial jobs that do not provide a living wage, making many refugee women vulnerable to sex work and increasing child labor and school dropout rates.
• Limited access to healthcare, including reproductive and mental healthcare.
• Limited availability of educational opportunities.

4. Transparency International, January 2023. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2022.”

5. L’Orient Today, July 2023. “The National Anti-Corruption Commission finally exists, but work remains.”