Lesson sharing phase of the project ‘Reinforcing the capacity of Tripolitans to respond to crises’

08/02/2022

In April 2022, a three-year project run by North Leda, Bioforce and Groupe URD, which aims to improve crisis response by Tripolitan actors, will come to an end. The first quarter of the year will therefore be a time to look at what the project has achieved, with interviews and seminars taking place in Lebanon and France.

How the project came together and its objectives

In order to respond to the crises in their territory, local civil society organisations need to be reactive, well-structured, competent, and coordinated, and their role needs to be recognised. In parallel, institutional actors need to be able to facilitate civil society activities, and to coordinate and steer the response.

The objective of the project was therefore to increase recognition of their role and help build their capacity to respond to the crises in their territory, based on three activities:

Reinforcing the individual and collective capacities of around ten civil society organisations;
Providing the municipality with support in preparing for, preventing and responding to crises within its territory;
Establishing an inclusive crisis management unit within the municipality.

The project’s central ambition was the structural re-localisation of aid. It aimed to increase the autonomy of local structures so that their role in crisis response was recognised.

The project was run by a consortium made up of the Bioforce Institute, North LEDA and Groupe URD. This was established due to the three partners’ shared interest in current aid localisation issues as promoted by the Grand Bargain, particularly the need to reinforce local actors’ role in preparing for and responding to crises.

A lesson-sharing phase to end the project

The objective of this phase is to learn lessons from the implementation of the project so that these can be integrated into future projects that aim to localise aid in Tripoli, the surrounding region and Lebanon in general. The end of project review is a learning process and an opportunity for the organisations who have been involved to identify what they have learned, to take a step back from their practices and clarify how they have proceeded.

In addition to an initial literature review, the lesson-sharing exercise includes interviews with the key actors of the project, and two seminars in the first quarter of 2022, in Lebanon and in France, where lessons learned will be shared and debated.

An initial conference will take place in Tripoli in February with the Lebanese partners involved in the project. The aim will be to highlight what the project has achieved and to present the main results, challenges and issues at stake from the point of view of the actors involved. After these exchanges, we will go further in our analysis by collectively discussing the issues at stake in preparing for and managing a crisis, with a focus on cooperation between civil society actors (with varying levels of organisation), municipal actors, national actors, international actors, etc.

This event will be followed by a second final conference, this time in France, with the project partners and donors, at the end of March 2022.

The project is funded by the French Development Agency (AFD).