IREX IN LEBANON

About The Youth Civil Society Leadership Program (YCSL)
The Youth Civil Society Leadership Program (YCSL) promoted activism among young leaders to address
corruption and bad governance. Youth between the ages of 18 and 25 identified critical issues related
to bad governance and worked to increase transparency and accountability in their communities.
At the beginning, the program identified youth leaders across seven of Lebanon’s most violence-prone regions,
and trained them in a variety of skills – from conflict mitigation, advocacy, community mobilization, to
program implementation skills. Twenty-eight of the youth received small grants to implement their initiatives
that targeted bad governance and sectarian divide. In implementing their projects, the young men and women
developed civic consciousness and a sense of personal empowerment, as they modeled effective activism
in their communities. Also as a result of their initiatives, the youth demonstrated how divided communities
can come together for a common cause – to build better governance in Lebanon.
Through the program, the youth came together to form a nation-wide youth coalition, the Lebanese Youth
Coalition against Corruption (LYCAC), which provided a space for youth to work together on anticorruption
initiatives beyond the life of the program. The entirely youth-led Coalition will raise awareness of
bad governance, serve as an anti-corruption watchdog organization, lobby for transparency and accountability,
and work with youth from diverse confessional backgrounds to implement anti-corruption initiatives in
their communities.
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