24 June 2005
BEIRUT: A recent report on poverty in Lebanon published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) estimates around 28 per cent of the population are living below the set poverty line of $2.2 per capita per day.
To eradicate national poverty, a group of local and international civil society activists as well as government and UN representatives gathered at Beirut's Crown Plaza Hotel to establish a coordination mechanism to enable them to achieve concrete action regarding this problem.
The two-day seminar, sponsored by the Social Affairs Ministry, was jointly organized by the UN Development Program (UNDP), the Canadian Fund for Social Development and the Arab NGO Network for Development.
Mona Hammam, UN resident coordinator and UNDP resident representative said this collaboration is a testament to the partnership that exists among different stakeholders committed to achieving the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG): to "Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger."
She said: "In Lebanon the potential is great to achieve most of the MDGs by 2015, it is realistic to expect that Lebanon may even exceed the MDG target of reducing extreme poverty by half by that year."
Hammam said even though Lebanon is marked by slow economic growth, weak agricultural productivity and a widening gap between rural and urban incomes, the situation can be solved by adopting economic policies that generate growth and employment as well as through targeted reduction interventions.
Niaamat Kanaan, representing Social Affairs Minister Mohammad Khalife, said the ministry had developed a project aimed at improving the living conditions of the poor. She said: "The objective of the project is to implement a targeted poverty alleviation program which entails making poverty alleviation a national priority by developing a national program for poverty reduction.
She added this project assumes a strengthening of the government's capacities to develop an integrated strategy for poverty reduction.
She also said it would help in implementing poverty reduction projects through enhancing the participation of members of civil society, and adopting monitoring tools for assessing change as well as enhancing the use of national statistics to identify who the poor are and what they most require.
Georges Farah, secretary of the association of local NGOs, said it will require courage to tackle the issue of poverty in Lebanon. He added that the ultimate goals of NGOs are to strengthen cooperation with the government, the economic institutions and international NGOs in order to achieve the first MDG.
