Malmö University's Master's programme, founded in 2000

The report for the Cross-sectoral formative research – Knowledge, attitude and practice study, which was conducted under the leadership of ComDev professor Ronald Stade on behalf of the country office of UNICEF Lebanon is now available online.

The purpose of the KAP Study is,

• To establish a baseline for UNICEF Lebanon’s Country Programme Document for the period 2017 to 2020
• To recommend C4D interventions that are successful in removing barriers to the adoption of positive practices with regard to education, child survival, child protection, child rights and social inclusion

The background for the KAP Study is the impact of the Syrian crisis. Lebanon has received more international refugees per capita than any other country in the world. This has created an immense stress on Lebanon’s institutional capacities. Over one million children in Lebanon are directly affected by the crisis. They are in need of basic services like education, health care, clean water, as well as of protection and inclusion.

The empirical scope of the KAP Study has been

• To include Lebanese residents, Syrian refugees registered with UNHCR, Syrian refugees living in informal settlements and Palestine refugees living in Lebanon’s designated camps
• To cover each mohafaza (governorate) in Lebanon
• To include female and male respondents of all age groups
• To provide results on indicators for each of UNICEF Lebanon’s programme areas

The data for the KAP Study were collected using three methods, one quantitative and two qualitative:

• Questionnaire-based interviews with 7,000 households
• 48 focus group discussions
• 42 key informant interviews

From the collected data on the various indicators could be drawn conclusions about knowledge gaps and barriers to positive attitudes and practice, both among external stakeholders (caregivers and children) and internal stakeholders (providers of public services, including UNICEF and partners):

External stakeholders

• Attitudinal challenges and knowledge gaps with regard to gender differences
• Knowledge gaps on vaccinations, breastfeeding and menstruation
• Attitudinal challenges because of intensifying and spreading conservative norms, for example with regard to child marriage, family planning and forced pregnancies
• Gap between favourable attitudes towards positive discipline and persisting practice of negative discipline
• Lack of knowledge: children and caregivers do not know that child rights, in addition to a right to basic services, also include the right of expression, participation in decision-making and social inclusion
• Alarming knowledge gap with regard to disabilities

Internal stakeholders

• Capacity gaps in the field of medical ethics
• Capacity gaps in the delivery of clean water and the treatment of wastewater
• Insufficient capacities in the field of education
• Inadequate practices in the field of child protection, especially insufficient protection against violence
• Insufficient capacities to build trust, so that women are ready to report incidents of GBV and CP violations to formal authorities
• Insufficient capacity to professionally identify disabilities
• Insufficient integration of disability perspectives with other programmes
• Need for more participatory C4D initiatives

Project manager Lana Khattab reflected on the research in her article Humanitarian response in Lebanon: changing social norms or reproducing them? and concluded:
Although aid organisations are increasingly concerned about promoting gender equality, when faced with people’s immediate needs and the urgency to addressing them as fast as possible, social interventions can rely on, and reproduce, unequal gender roles and norms, rather than working to improve them.