SDNP Lebanon: Promoting Transparency

Laylan Rhayem had a problem. As Chief of Information at Lebanon's Ministry of Agriculture, she was in charge of a comprehensive Biodiversity Survey her Ministry had just completed - the first such survey ever conducted in her country. Such a document would obviously be an invaluable resource for scientists, environmentalists, educators, planners and policy-makers, and it was Ms. Rhayem's job to make it available for public use. But when the survey was completed in 1995, she had no place to put it.

"I had planned to put it in our documentation centre," Ms. Rhayem recalls, "but we were still recovering from the war, and we didn't have the facilities you would find elsewhere. Even today our documentation centre has no funding and no staff." The Ministry's library might have been a good choice, but it had been destroyed by fire during Lebanon's 18-year war, which ended in 1992. Ms. Rhayem had no alternative but to keep the Biodiversity Survey in a drawer in her office.

Then, in 1997, officials at the Ministry of Agriculture were approached by Georges Akl, National Coordinator of the Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in Lebanon. Mr. Akl suggested the Ministry should have an Internet web site, and offered to train its personnel in developing and maintaining the site. Most of the officials were hesitant, others were reluctant and some were openly opposed to the idea, but Ms. Rhayem was overjoyed. Thanks to her lobbying and hard work, the web site was finally approved. The Ministry obtained Internet access through a commercial server, and in late 1998 the web site was up and running. The first piece of information to be loaded onto it was the biodiversity survey, followed in short order by a National Village Survey and an Agricultural Production Survey for 1997. A comprehensive General Agricultural Survey is currently being prepared.

Connectivity and the speed of change

The experience of SDNP in Lebanon has been unique, shaped on the one hand by swift technological change and on the other by centuries-old traditions and attitudes. When the initial SDNP feasibility study was conducted in 1994, there was only one ISP node in the country (at the American University of Beirut), and far too few telephone lines. "Lebanon was coming out of a long war and everything to do with infrastructure was in bad condition," explains Dr. Lamia Mansour, sustainable development adviser at UNDP in Beirut. "This included telephones, the quality of the telephone lines, the capacity of the telephones, the stability of the lines. But by the time we signed the project document and recruited a national coordinator, it was two years later and everything had changed."

In late 1996 when Georges Akl became SDNP National Coordinator, not only had ample, high-quality telephone lines been installed in Lebanon, but ISPs had proliferated on the local market, competing with each other to the point where their services were generally affordable. Mr. Akl decided not to waste the US $250,000 in UNDP project funds on setting up an ISP that was no longer needed. He had seen the host Ministry of another SDNP project in the region provide connectivity by installing a leased-line server at a cost of $1,500 a month, which proved to be an unrecoupable financial burden for the Ministry involved.

In Lebanon, the price of connectivity had dropped. "You can have unlimited access to the Internet for $40 a month," says Mr. Akl, "Since the trend is towards dropping the prices, we saw that we could not compete with the private sector. We decided to achieve something on the human side of the project by providing added value. So we started publishing web sites."

Redefining power

Mr. Akl focused on SDNP's primary mandate: promoting information-sharing in support of sustainable development through the use of Communications Technologies by means of persuasion, awareness-raising and training. As an inducement to new users, or "partners," he offered to cover the first six months of their connectivity costs with local ISPs. All of the 15 government institutions and NGOs that received this subsidy opted to pay for the service themselves when the six months ended. "We studied the market carefully to see how we could implement this with the least cost in terms of equipment," Mr. Akl. "We decided to spend more on human capacity-building and the promotion of the idea of information-sharing, and we implemented the technical connectivity in a very sustainable way. Now that the project has ended, we haven't left the Ministry of Environment, where we are operating, with lots of costs to bear."

Resolving the connectivity issue was relatively straightforward; convincing the Lebanese of the value of information-sharing was the hard part. "There are people here who think that having information -- and keeping it to yourself -- is power," Mr. Akl explains. "You have to make them understand that the opposite is true. If you keep information only for yourself, its power is of no use to you. But if you share it with everybody, then everybody knows who you are and what you're doing. That is where the power lies."

It was a hard sell. Indeed, Dr. Mansour of UNDP sees the gradual change in mentality sparked by SDNP as the most profound and far-reaching aspect of the project. "I think what's most important is this new custom of accepting to publish information on the web," she says. "The availability of information is a big constraint in this country. We're still at the stage where, because information is power, people want to keep it under lock and key, whatever information it is. It was an agonizing process for Georges to convince people to put a few things on their web sites, but he succeeded in getting a large number of web sites published."

According to Dr. Mansour, the jealous guarding of information had long been a practice not only of public institutions but of other development stakeholders, such as NGOs and research facilities, as well. The local professional culture was characterized more by a sense of competition among development actors than by collaboration. Mr. Akl says he sometimes spent months convincing the staff of a government Ministry of the benefits of publishing a web site, and that enthusiasts like Laylan Rhayem at the Ministry of Agriculture were a welcome exception to the rule. In fact, Mr. Akl notes that finding a key person in an institution, who understands the value of information technology and can convince others in the organization, is critical to success.

"We approached the sources of information, the Ministries, NGOs, researchers and educational institutions," says Mr. Akl. "We believed that they have substantial information to be shared by other beneficiaries. The problem was how to extract it from their drawers."

In the end, he did this by showing what others had done. Before visiting a given Ministry, Mr. Akl would print out the first three or four pages of the web sites of corresponding Ministries in, for example, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Then he would bring these along to the meeting. "I would say, 'Look, guys, what you can have over the Net if you supply me with information. Then everybody will know about you.'"

During the short two-year life span of the project, SDNP Lebanon trained some 200 individuals, including 35 staff members at government institutions, 120 members of NGOs and 35 journalists from virtually every media organ in the country, in every aspect of information technology, from its philosophical underpinnings to how to send an email, how to send and receive attachments, how to use the Internet in HTML, and how to develop and maintain a web site. "He involved all parties who were concerned with sustainable development, with a special focus on the environment," says Dr. Mansour. "Often this meant getting them accustomed to using computers in the first place, because some people had never had access to computers before. There was all sorts of training, from learning how to touch the keyboard and use the mouse to working with Windows and maneuvering more sophisticated software necessary to the establishment of home pages."

Among the NGOs trained in Internet access by SDNP is an umbrella group called the NGO Forum, which brings together a number of groups working in various fields. "After our work with them," says Mr. Akl, "these people are now building a database on women's rights in Lebanon. They're collecting information using the Internet from different sources in the country. Believe me, they were not doing this one year back."

The flow of information

In 1996 there were no government home pages, or web sites, in Lebanon. By early 1999, SDNP had helped develop nine web sites for Lebanese Ministries and public institutions and about ten web sites for NGOs and publications. Eight additional web sites were also created for environmental government programmes. In addition, 20 private web sites and seven web sites of academic and research facilities were developed and hosted on the SDNP Lebanon home page. Many of these sites are also linked to one another to further facilitate networking and information-sharing.

"I think the SDNP web site is one of the most sophisticated web sites in Lebanon," says Lamia Mansour. "Georges has triggered a chain of information-sharing in this country because he has linked various organizations one to the other. One thing is for sure: this project has established a nice infrastructure which is going to serve us as a lesson. We have learned a lot from it and we can build on what we have learned. I think it has proved itself as a way to change attitudes and help us to move forward."

The Ministry of Environment, SDNP's partner in the project, has a particularly rich web site aimed at creating awareness of environmental issues, with an emphasis on providing support for environmental NGOs throughout the country. "SDNP trained the key employees at our Ministry, and today everyone has email access and uses the Internet to look for information on a regular basis," says Marwan Moudallal, Chief of Information at the Ministry of Environment.

In fact, SDNP also played a role in tailoring the support NGOs received from the Ministry of Environment to strengthen IT capacity. When the Ministry earmarked US $5,000 in funding for each of the major environmental NGOs, SDNP arranged for US $2,000 of each amount to be spent on computers and connectivity for those NGOs who needed extra help.

The Ministry of Environment's web site contains 16 different pages, or categories, designed primarily to increase awareness of environmental issues among the general public, particularly NGOs. These include a search engine called Library where books and publications can be located through various means including author, publisher, title, and key words, and a page called Green Links that provides access to 75 international environmental web sites and search engines.

What difference does this sudden influx of information make to the people of Lebanon? "It seems to me that now we feel in step with the outside world," says Mr. Moudallal. "Everything that's happening in the way of progress in other countries, even though we're far away, we can follow it through the Internet. A new product, an invention, whatever it is, we know all about what's going on. We have access to all the information that others have, and we can give them what we have in the way of information. The world has become very small. There are no borders any more. Nothing escapes us now."

Untangling the web

However exciting this newfound access may be to those, like Mr. Moudallal, who have received training in it from SDNP, it can still be intimidating to the uninitiated. Dr. Joseph Serhal is an agro-economist at the Lebanese Institute for Agronomic Research, who helped prepare the Ministry of Agriculture's biodiversity survey, and who now consults the Ministry's web site on a regular basis. "I have definitely noticed a boom in the use of the Internet in the last six months or so," says Dr. Serhal. "But this boom has not reached everyone. Researchers are divided into two categories. One group understands the use of the Internet while the other, who may be the majority, refuses not only to use the Internet but to use computers at all. I have colleagues who ask their secretary or assistant to use the computer for them. They don't use it themselves."

George Akl understands that to the newcomer, the Internet especially can be a scary place. In order to further motivate people to use the Internet, he has given a great deal of thought to making it more "user friendly," especially for the 120 members of (mostly environmental) NGOs that SDNP has trained in its use. "We noticed that those people are very thirsty for information," he says. "But even though they practiced with us after receiving the training, they really lacked the know-how to use the Internet effectively. Sometimes they were totally lost in looking for information." Mr. Akl notes that when a person using search engines such as Yahoo or Altavista asked for references to, say, air pollution, he or she would be given something like 25,000 links. "They would spend three hours just to see which of the links is the one that they want," he maintains. "So that they wouldn't lose interest, we came up with a solution."

The solution is the Environmental Web Directory, (http://www.sdnp.org.lb/envsearch.htm), which can be accessed both on SDNP Lebanon's web site and on that of the Ministry of Environment. The directory contains 19 major categories, ranging from air pollution to water and including, among other things, biodiversity, chemicals, deforestation, environmental economics, marine life, natural resources conservation, ozone, population, renewable energy, solid waste and urbanization. Possible keywords run into the hundreds, but the number of links or sources of information has been carefully weeded out so that only the most useful ones are included. Thus, if one enters the category "biodiversity," there are 75 sites to choose from. "Biodiversity" coupled with the keyword "animals" brings up 35 sites. The category "deforestation" calls up 57 sites, but with the keyword "education" it produces just nine sites. "Air pollution" has 39 sites, but coupled with the keyword "fuel" it brings up only four sites.

"We conducted an intensive Internet search to find links to each of these 19 topics," says Mr. Akl. "Now people can find sources of information, sources of funding or experts in any given field. For example, let's say your search takes you to the US Environmental Protection Agency. We put the name of the agency, the Internet address, and a small summary which researchers can read to see if this site answers their question or not, before really getting into the Net and spending money. They loved it."

Mr. Akl actually sees the Environmental Web Director as the single most successful contribution his project has made, and he loves to recall the first time it was demonstrated to a group attending an SDNP seminar. "You should have seen the faces of the people when they first used it to search for things," he says. "We had two Ministers present at that presentation. When they heard what the people were saying to us they said, 'What magic did you do to those people that they love you so much?'"

An ongoing future

It may seem ironic that SDNP Lebanon, established in a country renowned for its merchants and businessmen, never became a commercial enterprise and never tried to make any money. What it did do was respond to local needs by focusing on awareness-raising and training in the use of information technology on behalf of key stakeholders. Having done this, the project still had US $50,000 left over from its original funding from UNDP. A new project called the Environmental Observatory is taking shape at the Ministry of Environment, to be headed by Mr. Akl, executed by UNDP and funded by the European Union. It will involve the training of Ministry staff in developing databases and collecting and analysing information to be made available on the Internet. And Mr. Akl is also seeking funding for a project to establish "Cyber-centers" in various parts of Lebanon, particularly in rural areas. "In every village," he points out, "you find at least one person who can read and write in English or French, and they can become the link to the Internet for the whole community."

Despite its short duration, UNDP's Lamia Mansour feels that SDNP did manage to accomplish its goals. "It has addressed the national need," she says. "Georges got people used to information technology. Now they are hooked on it, they can seek it for themselves."

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