The Promise of Localization: The Case of Beirut
For the Mayors Migration Council and our partners, the Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees is a success for more than one reason. It directly improves the lives of urban migrants and refugees. It allows cities the rare opportunity to put their own ideas into practice without unnecessary red tape. It generates evidence on new and exciting programs worthy of scale and replication. It signals a more agile way forward for a multilateral system still slowed by its own heavy weight.
For us personally, the GCF is a success because it trusts local actors in an industry that too often marginalizes them. For all the international community talks of localization and its promises, there are many delays tied to power dynamics, allusions to “limited capacity,” and mistrust.The GCF is our way of saying, “you know what you’re doing and you should have the backing to do it as well as you can, for as long as it’s needed.” We say this to cities all over the world, no matter their disadvantages, from Ramallah, Palestine to Dunaivitsi, Ukraine.
And our cities are turning short-term investments into long-term impact. With now 19 cities having successfully achieved the objectives they set out in their grant term, 16 of them are continuing their projects on their own accord. Some for years afterwards.
Take Beirut for example. Selected in 2021 as one of the first five GCF grantees tasked with an inclusive response to Covid-19 with a modest $174,000 investment, the Municipality of Beirut launched the city’s first ever municipal mobile health clinic. The clinic provided free and accessible healthcare to residents of marginalized communities, regardless of origin and migration status. Through the clinic, the Municipality assisted over 3,500 Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi, and other non-Lebanese residents of Beirut during the project’s timeframe and made the clinic a permanent fixture of the city’s healthcare system.
Fast forward to today, Lebanese cities are facing a new crisis. Israeli hostilities in Lebanon have displaced more than 1.2 million Lebanese from the south into Beirut and northern cities. And Lebanese local governments (including governorates, municipalities, and Unions of Municipalities) are providing a welcome so common for host cities around the world. Cities all over Lebanon such as Tyre, Bourj Hammoud, and Deir Ammar are opening up schools and other public facilities to serve as emergency shelters. Nabatieh is operating 12 shelters across the city despite coming under heavy attack.
In Beirut, the governor has turned over 167 schools into shelters and is leading coordination efforts among the dozens of local NGOs responding to the needs of displaced people (54,838 IDPs). Ordinary residents are starting mutual aid initiatives and volunteering with NGOs to provide for displaced families living in tents around central Beirut. And with hospitals nearing capacity, the Municipality of Beirut was able to quickly repurpose its Mobile Health Clinic in partnership with Lebanese American University and the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health.
Once focused on testing and vaccinating migrants and refugees, the municipality is now deploying the clinic to deliver medicine and lifesaving healthcare services to remote areas of Beirut with the highest number of displaced Lebanese. In just a few days, the clinic has provided care to over 520 displaced families with plans to stay deployed for as long as needed.
As Municipality of Beirut Councilwoman Yusra Sidani told the MMC, “the GCF’s early support has been crucial in helping us now launch this essential service for displaced individuals. We need more international actors to show the same trust in the Municipality of Beirut to respond to those displaced within our city.”
The trust of the GCF in often overlooked cities such as Beirut is proving to be a lifeline, however thin, in two separate crises. In 2021, it was clear Beirut knew what it was doing in its inclusive response to Covid-19. Today, the city continues to save lives thanks to a modest investment from the GCF.
The GCF is almost five years old. While it still has a lot to prove, it is already demonstrating that trusting in cities to respond to displacement today can lead to quicker and more effective responses to displacement in the future. That is the promise of localization.
Dozens of cities in Lebanon now need that same trust and support from the international community. For more information on how to help them, contact our GCF Strategic Partners, UN-Habitat Lebanon, at unhabitat-lebanon@un.org.
