The Consumer-Citizen Lab (CCL) is Nudge Lebanon’s jewel offering, an initiative made possible through generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The CCL seeks to extend the discipline of behavioral economics to universities in Lebanon and, eventually, in the Arab region, build the capacity of students and future practitioners, and connect various stakeholders, including government agencies, NGOs, experts, and academics.
The CCL enables sharing, discussing, and recommending innovative solutions for many national challenges. If you have a policy challenge in mind, or even ideas for a nudge or a behavioral experiment, please do not hesitate to share them with us through the Consumer-Citizen Space.
In 2018, the Proudly Non-Smoking Initiative was launched by Nudge Lebanon, in collaboration with the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism, to encourage compliance of restaurants and cafes with law 174, which legislates the ban on in-door smoking in public spaces. The initiative was based on extensive field work that was done by Nudge Lebanon to determine compliance rates, followed by a campaign to encourage compliance with the law through the use of behavioural insights, including dynamic social norms. The campaign aimed to publicly recognize compliant restaurants in order to communicate the growing voluntary compliance with law 174 and encourage further compliance. This initiative was later scaled up in websites and mobile applications that provide reviews about restaurants in order to further recognize compliance and encourage it in restaurants across Lebanon.
Following the devastating port explosion in Beirut last August and the subsequent outpouring of aid being diverted to victims through non-governmental organizations and initiatives, little was being done to help ensure the transparency of such relief efforts. This was especially challenging given decades of endemic corruption and a lack of accountability among government, with little precedence on how to practice transparency. To address this challenge, Nudge Lebanon and the Lebanese Transparency Association developed Transparent Hearts, an online platform to empower non-governmental organizations and initiatives to be transparent and support them in assessing their strengths and weaknesses through a transparency checklist (www.transparent-hearts.org). Over 160 non-governmental organizations, non-registered initiatives, and private companies and practitioners were engaged with during meetings, outreach, and capacity building workshops as part of this initiative.
In addition, Nudge Lebanon leveraged behavioral insights and experimentation methods to increase engagement with these stakeholders and increase the number of entities joining Transparent Hearts and committing to greater transparency. We engaged with over 60 entities during workshops, in addition to many others during individual engagements, and over 30 non-governmental organizations and initiatives officially expressed their willingness to join the Transparent Hearts platform and to use the transparency checklist to assess their transparency levels.
Facing the aftermath of Beirut’s August 4th devastating explosion, Nudge Lebanon switched gears to help contribute to the city’s massive humanitarian relief effort by developing the Consumer Citizen Relief Platform (CCRP). This platform connected entities who provided in-kind donations with victims and households that were most affected by the blast. Entities and individuals were able to post different types of in-kind donations and victims who required these types of supplies and services were able to claim them by visiting the platform, with the CCRP serving to match the urgent needs of victims with the provided donations.
Over the course of 4 months, we are proud to have supplied food, cleaning and other essential supplies to over 310 households across several Beirut neighborhoods including Achrafieh, Karantina, Mar Mkhael, Burj Hamoud, Basta, and many others. Our collaborations with several NGOs such as Nusaned, Oath Group, Iftar in a Box, Dar el Amal, Al Makan, Muslims World League and other were essential in helping us make this possible.