Key Findings:
- Credit and loans from within Lebanon are the most commonly shared tangible resource. Cash gifts including remittances sent from abroad accounted for a much smaller percentage of tangible ISP.
- Roughly half of respondents in both Barouk and Bourj Hammoud report that the number of people they can turn to for support has decreased in the last six months.
- Emotional support is equally important as tangible support according to respondents. Socially isolated communities such as Syrian nationals rely more on emotional support because they struggle to maintain solidarity networks that they established back home.
- The quality of ISP is equally, if not more, important to households than size. This means that while networks appear to be shrinking as purchasing power decreases, those with “the right kind” of social support remain better off than their worse connected peers.
- ISP diversity is another important variable for households’ wellbeing. Network diversity may grant households more reliable access to support throughout a crisis. However, those types of network are rare, with networks tending to be homogenous overall.
- Round 1 survey results confirm that LCAT’s ISP indicator measures a distinct aspect of household vulnerability compared to “traditional” vulnerability indicators. Almost half of households identified as vulnerable by the ISP indicator were not identified as vulnerable according to the two food security and two essential needs scores.
By Crisis Analytics Team, Mercy Corps Lebanon
