About MENA Insight

Mission

MENA Insight uses data and research to make the economic and social challenges facing the Middle East and North Africa easier to understand.

MENA Insight is an independent, student-led research project, currently in its first public release. Ten countries are covered, with Lebanon as the first detailed case study — the rest carry published overviews, not yet the same depth, and the site says so plainly rather than implying otherwise.

The material this platform works with is largely public already. Indicator databases are open, institutional reports are downloadable, national statistics are published. What is scarce is the connective work: putting a number next to its definition and its limits, next to the experience it describes, in language that does not assume the reader is an economist.

The audience is the general public. The standard is the one a researcher, journalist, teacher or policy analyst would apply. Those are not in tension — plain language is not loose language, and a claim that cannot be traced to a source does not appear here at all.

The founder

Rolf El Eid is the founder and researcher behind MENA Insight. He is Lebanese and based in Arlington, Virginia, and works at the intersection of economics, data science and public policy.

Why this project exists

The questions this platform asks came from Lebanon, and from watching how quickly the conditions of ordinary life can change there: a currency losing its value, electricity arriving for a few hours a day, prices moving faster than wages, families deciding whether to stay, and conflict interrupting whatever had been rebuilt since the last time.

What is striking about living through that is how hard it is to find an explanation of it that is both accurate and readable. Technical analysis exists but assumes a specialist reader. Accessible coverage exists but is often thin on evidence, or arrives only when something dramatic happens and disappears when it stops. The gap between those two is where this platform is aimed.

Regional research background

The scope widened during an internship with the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND), a Beirut-based organisation working on development, human rights, social justice and civil society across Arab countries. That work involved regional research covering Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya — the same eight countries this site began with. Algeria has since been added as the ninth, and Syria as the tenth.

Reading those countries alongside one another made two things clear. The pressures differ enormously in cause and severity, and yet a set of recurring mechanisms shows up repeatedly: currency and price shocks transmitted through import dependence, public services displaced by private substitutes, young people weighing whether to stay, and data that stops being published exactly when conditions get worst.

Approach

Two commitments shape how the work is done, and they are visible on every page rather than stated only here:

• Publish the limits with the finding. An indicator's caveat sits next to its chart. What is not known is written down as carefully as what is.
• Never invent anything. No fabricated statistics, sources, citations, links, quotations, interviews or findings — including as illustration or as placeholder text that reads like analysis. Empty sections stay visibly empty.

Long-term goals

1. Complete the Lebanon section — build the two series Lebanon most needs and no one currently publishes: hours of electricity supply, and item-level everyday prices.
2. Bring the other nine countries up to the same depth, as sources and research partnerships allow.
3. Fill the three empty topics — press freedom, conflict and reconstruction, and hours of electricity supply — from named sources, with licences reviewed before republication.
4. Publish in Arabic. The site is already built for right-to-left layout; what is needed is translation, not reconstruction.
5. Make the platform useful to other researchers — open data exports, documented methods, and a structure others can contribute country sections to.

Contact

For corrections, source suggestions, or research collaboration:

Email eleidrolf@gmail.com.

Acknowledgements

MENA Insight republishes data collected at considerable public expense by the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and made freely available under open licences. The platform exists because that work exists.

Individual contributors of research, translation and review will be acknowledged here, with their permission.