Financial lives of Lebanese and Syrian Refugees in Lebanon

Financial services have a key role to play in building resilience in crisis contexts by providing tools to build assets and mitigate risks. To understand how to provide these tools in the Lebanese context, this research seeks to better understand how these communities manage their financial lives, cope with shocks and make use of formal and informal services.

To do so, data was collected through focus group discussions (FGD) and in-depth interviews (IDIs) with Syrian refugees and Lebanese households living in districts with strong concentrations of Syrian refugees. This qualitative approach enabled the research to deep-dive on the behaviors of households in these communities and identify behavior patterns, needs and current solutions used. To fine-tune the analysis, Syrian refugees were segmented by vulnerability (vulnerable, developing) and Affected Lebanese were segmented by level of income (low-income, middle-income).

This report puts particular emphasis on how households manage their income and expenses and how they cope with external shocks such as illness, accidents or loss of/damage to assets.