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USAID gives media first tour of
its assistance projects
By Stephen Dockery
ALEY, Lebanon: The picturesque
town of Aley, renown as one of Lebanon’s most attractive summer spots, is
also home to one of the most popular faces of American diplomacy in the
country.
A buck-toothed squirrel mascot
named Sanjoub at the USAID-backed Association for Forests, Development and
Conservation is telling the Lebanese to prevent forest fires – and he’s a
hit with the kids.
After presentations from
environmentalists highlighting the U.S. Agency for International
Development’s forest fighting projects, local teenagers crowd around to
take pictures with the caricature squirrel with a big brown felt face, a
yellow hard hat and firefighter jacket.
USAID looked to raise the
profile of some of the U.S. Embassy’s more successful projects Thursday,
conducting its first press tour of aid recipients in villages in a nation
that has difficulty providing for its neediest areas.
The embassy and the organization
showed off projects in small mountain villages at a high school in the Metn
village of Bteghrine, a specialized food factory in nearby Ain al-Qabou and
the nature and education facility in the village of Ramlieh.
Altogether the projects total
more than $100 million over several years and are a fraction of the
U.S.-backed projects in Lebanon. USAID’s projects are also just a portion
of the total annual foreign aid that floods into Lebanon’s more neglected
areas.
Meanwhile, in the small village
of Ain al-Qabou in Aley, a small stone building houses one of USAID’s more
ambitious projects.
A $7.5 million grant has helped
turn the Mymoune women food factory into a specialized goods producer for
American markets.
In a white kitchen overlooking
the valley, women workers peel, pit, and cook locally grown fruits to make
natural jams and flavored waters.
The kitchen produces jams in all
flavors from apricot, strawberry and fig to Lebanese specialties like rose
mulberry. The jams have no additives and taste like they are made entirely
of fruit.
USAID money went into
standardizing the food production and helping business owners navigate the
complicated food-approval processes for U.S. markets in order to tap into a
multi-billion dollar market for premium food products.
“It’s an example that Lebanon
products can enter the U.S. specialty food market,” says Georges Frenn,
senior economic growth specialist for USAID. “It impacts rural areas and
brings up the whole rural economy.”
The USAID project that helped
Mymoune also worked with a number of other businesses in the country to tap
into foreign markets and connect with other local businesses like tourism.
Frenn says he hopes the company
will be an example of how technical knowledge can improve a stunted
agriculture industry.
Lebanon is dependent on imports
for a large proportion of its food supplies, putting the nation more at
risk to price inflation and food insecurity for the poor.
This project does little to help
import dependency, but Frenn says the access of small- and medium-sized
companies to international markets can be improved by its successes.
Foreign aid in the form of such
USAID projects is most often directed toward basic infrastructure needs
like water pumps or repairs to roads and dilapidated buildings like
schools.
They are projects in remote
areas that the underfunded and overstretched government cannot tend to.
In a public school perched on a
hillside over Bteghrine, a once-derelict playground is now paved over and
clean. The school’s crumbling stairway has been tidied up and remodeled,
and its crumbling door frames have been patched up and repainted.
The school was renovated with
$56,000 that came from the first installment of USAID’s $75 million program
five-year program to help Lebanon’s most neglected public schools with
improvements and teacher training.
In an indication of the decrepit
state of Lebanese schools, Education Ministry officials have even asked
that all of the country’s 3,510 schools be considered in the full
implementation of the USAID program,
“It improved the morale of the
students and gave them a good environment to get an education,” said Yola
Saliba principal of the school in Bteghrine.
Working in the school’s recently
upgraded chemistry lab, 16-year-old student Hafiz Saliba points to pictures
of the room before renovation.
“The faucet was not reaching the
sink,” he said pointing to crooked metal pipes that ran along the desks. “I
didn’t like to come to the lab.”
“Now it works.”
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