Link to Atlas Project

Documents

Overview

This TOR falls under the UNDP project “Improving Living Conditions in Palestinian Gatherings Host Communities”, which aims at enhancing access to Basic Urban Services BUS (water, sewerage, solid waste management, electricity, roads) and shelter conditions. In addition to the 12 official Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon, a total of 42 Palestinian Gatherings are distributed along the regions of Lebanon, housing Palestinian refugees in the South (Tyr and Saida), North, Beirut and Beqaa. Palestinian Gatherings are informal settlements ‘constituting relatively homogenous refugee communities, such as smaller villages or households living in the same multi-story residential buildings” (fafo, 2003).

Being informal areas, Palestinian gatherings remain excluded from national strategies or local development plans, increasing poverty and marginalization of the local refugee communities and the deterioration of the living environment. The forty-two gatherings fall under the municipal domain of twenty-five municipalities; however, municipalities in general do not intervene to provide basic urban services or improve the physical environment in these areas. The lack of municipal intervention is attributed to a number of reasons mainly: lack of financial resources; the security situation in the gatherings mainly adjacent to camps; and most importantly misconceptions that the gatherings are served by UNRWA. In fact, as per UNRWA’s mandate, the Agency’s services targeting refugees living in the gatherings are restricted to education and health coverage. UNRWA’s interventions in terms of basic urban services, including WASH, and shelter self-help programmes are restricted to the boundaries of the 12 official camps. Due to the lack of service providers, refugees living in the gatherings resort to a number of informal self-help initiatives to access and maintain basic urban services. While these informal practices that are affordable to dwellers ensure their access to some services, the services themselves are inadequate, insufficient and characterized by huge gaps and shortfalls. In addition, they are ultimately connected in an ad-hoc manner to the surrounding municipal networks or to the camps’ networks in the case of gatherings that are adjacent to camps; however no coordination mechanisms exist between the actors. Since 2012 and with the increased influx of Palestinian and Syrian refugees from Syria, the conditions of the living environment in the gatherings have been dramatically worsening.

During the project implementation, the project team was referred to locations outside official camp and Palestinian gatherings that house Palestinian refugees and that face similar conditions to those in the gatherings. It is the project’s intention to identify these communities where municipalities do not interfere in service provision or where clear needs exist, specify their location and carry out a rapid assessment of their needs.