Ливанские малые предприятия вынуждены самостоятельно восстанавливать энергоснабжение и банковские операции из-за системного кризиса

In Lebanon, instability is a daily operating burden that businesses are increasingly forced to absorb on their own. Institutional resilience is vital for small and medium enterprises in this national context, where economic collapse and recurring security crises compound to create cascading failures in electricity, banking, supply chains, and administrative systems. For every single SME, it means deciding which functions cannot be allowed to fail and then rebuilding them at firm level when the wider environment cannot support them reliably. From my experience in leading corporate strategy, digital transformation and business development, this usually comes down to a few core continuity points: energy, payments, procurement, documentation, workforce coordination, and client trust. The companies that remain dependable are not simply the ones that work harder. They are the ones that redesign their internal systems so these functions continue to operate despite external breakdowns. Electricity is the clearest example of this private substitution. Before the recent solar boom, a 2019 IMF country report drawing on World Bank enterprise data found that 97 percent of surveyed businesses in Lebanon reported experiencing electrical outages, while 84 percent said they used private generators, which supplied almost half of their electricity needs. That figure should now be read as a pre-solar baseline rather than a current description of the market. But the management lesson remains the same: firms have had to build parallel energy systems because the public one is not dependable enough. The response to the collapse of state electricity has been striking. According to the Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation’s 2023 Solar PV Status Report, installed solar PV capacity rose from 92 MWp at the end of 2020 to 1,081 MWp by the end of 2023, with cumulative investment reaching nearly $1.4 billion (LCEC, 2023). During Beirut Energy Week in September 2023, LCEC-linked figures indicated that decentralized solar capacity had already surpassed 1,000 MW and was tracking toward roughly 1,300 MW by year-end. Because EDL’s effective generation capacity had dropped so sharply, that meant installed solar capacity represented more than 40 percent of the country’s available electricity generation capacity at that moment. In the finalized 2023 report, LCEC said solar contributed 15 percent of Lebanon’s actual electricity generation mix for the full year, up from 2.2 percent in 2021. This matters because solar in Lebanon is not only an energy story. It is an institutional story. It shows what happens when households, businesses, and institutions are forced to replace a missing public function through private coordination, private investment, and private risk-taking. The same dynamic became visible in finance. Lebanon’s banking collapse is often discussed in terms of savings, currency, and macroeconomic loss. At company level, it also became an operational disruption. When conventional banking channels became unreliable, businesses could no longer treat billing, payment logic, procurement timing, and supplier coordination as back-office routines. In our corporate security firm, maintaining uninterrupted service required us to rethink those systems quickly. The issue was not simply whether money moved. It was whether service continuity could be preserved while the financial infrastructure itself was failing. In that sense, banking disruption did not only create financial pain. It forced firms to redesign commercial processes in real time. Data and institutional memory Another function that becomes more important as public institutions weaken is documentation, specifically the capacity of private sector SMEs to maintain reliable internal records when government systems and public documentation cannot be relied upon. In stable environments, documentation is often treated as administration. In unstable ones, where the state cannot be counted on to maintain records or provide documented proof, it becomes continuity infrastructure. When teams are under strain, sites are harder to access, staff availability shifts, and compliance still has to be maintained, records become part of the operating backbone. This is one reason I do not see resilience as improvisation alone. Improvisation helps in the moment, but it does not create reliability. Reliability comes from converting lessons into process: traceable records, stored reports, accessible histories, clearer handovers, and systems that do not rely entirely on memory or one individual’s availability. From my experience, firms that function more reliably under instability tend to rebuild the same six capabilities at company level. They learn to sense faster by tracking market, infrastructure, financial, supplier, and client signals in real time; to decide faster by shortening decision-making chains before problems intensify; and to adapt processes within limits by giving staff enough flexibility to respond without losing accountability. They also learn to protect continuity points, especially billing, procurement, compliance, workforce coordination, and client service; to preserve trust visibly through clearer communication and steadier client support; and, over time, to turn constraints into operating advantages by using crisis-driven adaptations to build leaner and more responsive systems. What policymakers should note The lesson for policymakers and lenders is straightforward. If Lebanese SMEs are privately rebuilding continuity in energy, payments, logistics, and compliance, then they are carrying costs that are often invisible in conventional business analysis. Support for SMEs cannot be reduced to finance alone. It has to account for the institutional burden businesses are already absorbing through backup systems, duplicated workflows, added coordination, and self-funded continuity measures. That is why institutional resilience in Lebanon should not be romanticized. It is expensive, inefficient, and often exhausting to privately reproduce functions that should be publicly reliable. But it is also one of the clearest explanations for why some firms remain dependable while others become fragile. The most resilient Lebanese SMEs are those that can ensure institutional continuity from the inside out.