American University of Beirut

The Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) organized an online seminar (webinar) titled "Digital Government in Lebanon: A Pipe Dream? ".

This webinar is the second in a series of webinars organized by the Governance and Policy Lab at the Institute, to address digital transformations in Lebanon and the impact that technologies and digital tools have on society, politics, and the economy. The webinar was broadcast live through IFI’s Facebook page. Participants were Rania Fakhoury, ICT (Information and Communications Technology) project manager at UNDP and the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reforms (OMSAR), Assaad Zebian, founder and director of Gherbal Initiative, and Omar Christidis, founder and executive director at ArabNet. The session was moderated by IFI’s Google policy fellow Karim Merhej.

Participants discussed how and why the public sector can be digitized, considering that Lebanon still ranks low, on a regional and global scale, in digitizing its government, despite the continuous research and work on executing multiple projects for digital transformation throughout Lebanon’s successive governments since the 1990s. This questioning raises multiple thoughts about the reasons behind the slow action towards implementing the necessary reforms.

In the webinar’s opening note, Karim Merhej differentiated between e-government (a government whereby ICTs are used to improve internal governance and to deliver governmental services via the Internet) and digital government (an advanced version of e-government whereby the government would use the latest technological innovations and tools, such as big data analytics, cloud computing, smartphone applications and social media platforms to provide the best possible services and ensure constant communication between citizens and their state), and moved to Rania Fakhoury, who tackled the current status of e-government in Lebanon.

Fakhoury stressed the existence of public databases on governmental websites that the public might not always be able to access or be aware of, especially that the public sector is making efforts in multiplying digital services in several institutions such as the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economy & Trade, and Ogero.

She added that around 7500 employees of the public sector have undertaken training in ICTs, and that the government has adopted a cybersecurity strategy in August 2019. Fakhoury affirmed that citizens can’t benefit from digital services if the appropriate infrastructure is absent, considering that Lebanon is generally plagued by bad governance in the public sector, weak human resources, a scattered approach to the implementation of e-government projects, and an absence of political will to unify such efforts and bring about a genuine digital transformation of the public sector. Political elites in the country generally ignore the importance of digitizing the State, and muse be made to realize that a digital transformation of the public administration must not be politicized. Fakhoury stressed on the need for restructuring and reforming public institutions.

On a similar note, Omar Christidis explained that Lebanon has reached this lackluster stage due to the lack of a unified decision-making and implementation process, as well as due to the fact that several relevant laws have not been applied to date. Digital transformation strategies are available, but it is quasi-impossible to genuinely implement them when decision-making is not unified. Christidis highlighted the importance of a national digital ID for citizens which could allow governmental entities to rapidly share data and information among themselves and with the citizens. He noted that a digital government requires transparency and accountability, despite the negative impact that automation has on governmental employment. To illustrate certain cases of relatively successful public sector digital transformation, Christidis mentioned the examples of Saudi Arabia and the emirate of Dubai, both of which have done so much progress to the point where artificial intelligence is being actively used.

Moreover, Assaad Zebian pointed out that Gherbal Initiative works on monitoring the work of governmental institutions to which the Right of Access to Information Law applies, emphasizing the notorious secrecy and unwillingness to provide data that has long characterized the Lebanese public sector. Zebian insisted on the need to train public sector employees on the usage of ICTs, and on the importance of submitting access to information requests. Zebian said that access to data is not enough if this data cannot be easily deciphered by the average citizen. He also pinpointed that sectarianism is a major hamper towards a digital transformation of the public sector, and that it is one of the major causes as to why Lebanon is in the dire straits that it finds itself in.

Merhej ended the webinar by stating that digital government in Lebanon is not a technical matter but a political matter, insisting on the fact that as long as deep-rooted and meaningful administrative reforms are not made to the public administration and to the country’s political system, digital government in Lebanon will remain a pipe dream.

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