In Lebanon, Tetra Tech is also working with local municipality partners to ensure community members are actively engaged in community development planning and decision-making processes, especially youth, women, and other marginalized groups.

In the southern village of Chwaya, our local partner, LTA, organized a town hall meeting which was attended by more than 87 people, including representatives of several political parties, a youth committee, and many women community members. During the meeting, the youth committee led a discussion on the need for the village to provide economic empowerment and civic education opportunities for women and youth, who face more barriers to participation in the labor force and government.

The discussion produced several fruitful recommendations to promote greater inclusion for women, youth, and other marginalized groups including: a community project to support women’s economic opportunities, such as a communal “produce house” where they can sell their locally-grown fruits and vegetables; transportation stipends for female students to access universities outside the village; and the creation of a cultural center for women and youth.

“One of the main challenges that our community is facing is youth migration to the cities; this project comes to empower the youth and give them the chance to be part of the process and, more importantly, it gave them the right tools to monitor the performance of the municipality.” – Issam Al Choudi, community leader in Chwaya

Through training and support to intermediary support organizations, who then in turn train civil society grantees on specialized advocacy issues, BALADI CAP has the reach to broadly strengthen Lebanese civil society to advocate for local and national reforms. The project has also worked with more than 50 municipalities and 50 civil society organizations to build their capacities, particularly in the areas of internal governance, financial management, and monitoring & evaluation.

The project’s civil society support builds off Tetra Tech’s Institutional Development Framework (IDF), an adaptable organizational self-assessment tool that was originally designed under USAID’s Capable Partners project to give organizations the tools and knowledge to continue long after donor support ends. First published in the 1990s, the IDF has been adapted and updated on multiple occasions, to adjust to particular country contexts and USAID priorities, such as the integration of tailored indices on gender, social media/public outreach, refugee concerns, and for use in capacity assessment of municipalities. Our experienced facilitators have worked with hundreds of organizations and trained others to apply the IDF in more than 50 countries.