The Lebanese parliament approved a loan from the World Bank last Friday worth $246 million and intended to help poorer people in a country hit by twin devastating blasts at the Beirut Port in August last year and a severe economic crisis that has grown worse due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the World Bank’s website, “emergency cash transfers and access to social services” will be given to about 786,000 “poor and vulnerable Lebanese” people from the country’s six-million population. Each member of roughly 147,000 “extremely poor Lebanese households” will receive monthly cash transfers of LBP100,000 for 12 months, it said.

Those benefiting from the programme will be able to access cash using prepaid cards from financial-services providers. They can either get the money from ATM machines or use the cards to pay for purchases from food shops.

Moreover, 87,000 children between the ages of 13 to 18 will also get cash transfers to pay for registration fees, parental council fees, school textbooks, transport, uniforms, computers and Internet connections used for online schooling. Schools will directly receive the tuition fees.

“With poverty and inequality on the rise, social stability is at risk and hard-won gains in human capital investment can be easily reversed. This new project will support the expansion of the national poverty targeting programme to protect poor and vulnerable households, particularly female-headed households and those with disabled or elderly people,” said Saroj Kumar Jha, World Bank Mashreq regional director, in a press statement.

“The consequences of these repeated shocks on the economic well-being of households is far-reaching and potentially disastrous.”

The statement said that the World Bank would also support increased access to quality social services provided by the Social Development Centres of the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs for 100,000 individuals from poor and vulnerable households. Social workers at the ministry and centre levels would be provided with capacity building activities to enable them better to carry out their functions.

The World Bank loan is a lifeline for the Lebanese government and people. One day before the parliament’s vote, France, a key political mediator between the Lebanese forces following last August’s port blasts, warned that the country was “running out of time” before it faced “complete collapse.”

 Paris called on all Lebanon’s political forces to finalise the government-formation talks currently underway in a bid to save the country.

“It’s been seven months, and nothing has been budgeted. It’s not too late, but we are running out of time before total collapse,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters.

He said that Lebanon’s collapse would not only be disastrous for its people, “but it would also be a disaster for Palestinian refugees, for Syrian refugees, for the entire region.”

“There is still time to act, but we have to do it fast because tomorrow it will be too late,” he said. Similar calls were made by Egypt and Jordan.

Last week, the Lebanese pound dropped against the US dollar to $1 being equivalent to LBP10,000 and leading to a huge hike in the prices of goods and services. Petrol prices rose by 30 per cent, while bread prices rose by almost 50 per cent. Power cuts are reportedly increasing in frequency as fuel shipments arrive later than expected, reaching 12 hours per day.

Meanwhile, protests continue to spread across the country amid public anger at the deteriorating social and economic conditions, a situation that Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University, believes will not change after the approval of the World Bank loan.

“The US dollar exchange rate has continued to rise to reach LBP14,000. The whole idea behind the loan is to get 800,000 Lebanese people who are related to the extremely poor sectors of society off the shoulders of the government. It’s the way the elites are trying to handle the crisis by mitigating the problems of a sector of society,” he said.

Salloukh said the protests were not part of a “homogenous protest movement.” The political forces in Lebanon were simply “distributing responsibilities” in order to deal with the situation, he said.

 “They gave the poor this loan. Big chunks of the middle class will leave the country and send money back to their family members. For the protesters in the streets, who have no one to back them, they will still think about how to deal with them,” Salloukh said.

There was “no unified plan” on how to address the crisis, he said. “They [the political elites] are dealing with the situation politically, not economically, which is very dangerous,” he warned.

Over the past two years, the Lebanese pound has lost about 60 per cent of its value against the US dollar, hugely affecting business owners in an import-based economy.

The depreciation of the currency along with the political deadlock have made protests and scenes of burning tyres and clashes with the security forces a regular phenomenon in Lebanese politics.

The Covid-19 pandemic and port blasts have added further wounds to the country. Government estimates show that Lebanon needs $10 to $15 billion to rebuild the destroyed areas after the explosions that left 300,000 people homeless.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 18 March, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly