The Libya Socioeconomic Dialogue Project is managed and implemented by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), thanks to a funding by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).
The goal of the project is to provide and support a platform for Libyans to formulate, discuss, evaluate and advocate for a socioeconomic Future Vision to achieve stabilization and development in Libya.
The platform will base its discussions on evidence-based research produced by the project in its initial, normative phase. The first step in the project was to conduct three baseline studies on the state of the Libyan economy, society and governance.
The LSED project and its research are also leveraged by ESCWA’s in-house expertise as well as the contributions of a wide range of Libyan and international experts and regional and international partners and collaborators.
The baseline studies - prepared by renowned Libyan experts - were intended to be comprehensive in order to provide an accurate understanding of the economic mechanisms, societal aspects and institutional pillars in Libya.
In the same context, the studies extracted and identified the areas of the major challenges and opportunities, which will provide the participants in the consultations of the Libyan socio-economic dialogue project with an opportunity to enrich the intellectual discussions with a view to formulate socioeconomic, policies, and road maps for of alternative methods for a progressive and balanced development in Libya.
These studies used the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a compass to identify potential priority themes that could serve as entry points or catalyst for broader transformative change and assist Libya’s progress in achieving the SDGs.
The baseline studies were enriched through extensive expert-level consultations, including discussions, reviews and contributions from a wide range of Libyan and international experts during the meetings held in 2019 that benefited the base studies with practical and international experiences and relevant best practices.
The virtual meeting via the Internet during its multiple sessions, with the facilitation of ESCWA interlocutors and a select group of Libyan facilitators and consultants, will seek to enrich detailed discussions in which views and ideas are exchanged in order to develop and strengthen the formulation and content of recommendations with specific, applicable and rational policies, so that the outcomes of these meetings will be a basis To prepare and write the future vision and the achieved policies. The meeting sessions will also accommodate the various proposed additions and recommendations that are useful and necessary for the success of the dialogue project and its social, economic and institutional domains, and its practical stages during the year 2020.