This qualitative study examines food security in Lebanon through a gendered and intersectional lens, exploring how economic crises, displacement, conflict, and institutional decline shape people’s lived experiences of hunger.
Building on a 2024 gender-sensitive IPC pilot, it moves beyond household-level data to analyze how food insecurity is experienced within families — particularly by women, caregivers, refugees, and marginalized groups. Using focus groups, interviews, and validation workshops, the study highlights intra-household inequalities, emotional labor, and structural dynamics often overlooked in traditional food security analysis.
Quantitative snapshot: Gendered Vulnerabilities Within Broader Crisis
The 2024 pilot survey (830 households across Baabda, Metn, Zahle, Baalbek, and Akkar) found no major overall gender difference at the household level in food consumption or coping strategies. However, individual-level data revealed critical disparities: only 19.6% of women aged 18–49 met minimum dietary diversity standards. Syrian women-headed households faced significantly worse outcomes (13.4% poor Food Consumption Score vs. 3.4% among Lebanese women-headed households), and Akkar and Bekaa showed severe regional vulnerabilities. Women’s dietary diversity was particularly sensitive to unemployment, displacement, and household size
Intra-household Inequities
Food insecurity is not distributed equally within families. The study highlights the paradox of women managing food logistics without financial authority. Women are often the first to skip meals or reduce portions, framing sacrifice as a moral duty. Nutritional priority typically follows a hierarchy: children, elderly or ill members, working men, and lastly women.
Coping Strategies
Households adopt layered coping strategies including debt accumulation, informal borrowing, asset liquidation, reduced spending on health or education, and in some cases high-risk activities. In rural areas, prolonged crisis has led to erosion of agricultural resilience.
Shifting Gender Roles & Fragile Masculinities
Economic hardship and displacement are reshaping gender norms. Women’s unpaid and informal labor burdens have expanded, while men’s identities as providers are strained. Some men are renegotiating caregiving roles, but these shifts remain fragile and emotionally charged. Masculinity is often tied to dignity and provision, and inability to provide food can trigger shame and psychological stress
Intersecting Vulnerabilities
Food insecurity interacts with health conditions, disability, caregiving responsibilities, social isolation, and displacement status. Women-headed households with children face especially high poverty rates. Syrian refugees consistently experience lower dietary diversity and higher coping severity than Lebanese households
Mental Health & Well-being
The study documents widespread emotional exhaustion, stress, and internalized shame among caregivers and youth. Mental health burdens are often underreported in food security surveys but surfaced strongly in qualitative discussions, particularly among women managing scarcity in overcrowded or displaced settings
Data Gaps & Policy Implications
Most national food security data remains household-level, obscuring intra-household inequalities. The study calls for sex-, age-, and disability-disaggregated IPC data, stronger integration of gender analysis in food security frameworks, and deeper collaboration between humanitarian actors and women-led organizations
This study reframes food insecurity in Lebanon not merely as a question of caloric access, but as a gendered, relational, and structural crisis. It demonstrates that while households may appear equally food insecure in aggregate data, the burdens, sacrifices, and psychosocial costs are unevenly distributed, with women and marginalized groups absorbing disproportionate impacts. By integrating quantitative indicators with feminist qualitative methods, it advocates for more inclusive, gender-sensitive food security analysis and programming aligned with lived realities.
