Lebanon's education reform faces a data blackout

Lebanon's education system is getting harder to track. Official exams have been cancelled for two consecutive years, budget-execution data has not been published since 2021, and the most recent national enrollment figures date to 2023–2024.

The gaps come as the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, under Minister Rima Karami, describes its current work as laying the groundwork for longer-term reform, a claim that is difficult to assess while several of the usual indicators are unavailable.

The exam cancellations are the most visible of the gaps. The brevet and the baccalaureate were called off in 2025 and again in 2026, after the cabinet scrapped the 2026 session and Parliament passed a law giving the substitute certificates legal cover. Karami had wanted to hold the exams across three staggered sessions and was overridden. The reason was the war in the south and the displacement of families into public schools, which the state judged made a fair, uniform exam impossible; given those conditions, it was a defensible call, and one many students and parents welcomed. But an exam is also a measurement, the one moment each year when the state records what its schools have produced. Suspended twice, that annual record goes dark.

Karami has described her role, repeatedly, as laying foundations for reform rather than completing it: a short, technocratic mandate meant to prepare the ground for whoever comes next. Whether any foundation is holding is the question the missing data makes hard to answer.

A system measurably in decline

Start with what we can still see, because the picture is bleak enough before the data runs out.

Public schools are disappearing as a destination for Lebanese families. According to figures from the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CRDP), the Education Ministry's own research arm, the share of students enrolled in public schools fell from 31% in 2021–2022 to 28% in 2022–2023 to 25% in 2023–2024, a drop of nearly six percentage points in two years. Private fee-paying schools now absorb roughly 60% of students.

What makes that shift striking is that it runs against the physical footprint of the system. Public schools make up 43% of all educational institutions in the country, the single largest category, ahead of private fee-paying schools at 42%. The state still owns the widest network of buildings; families have simply stopped sending their children into them. A public sector with the most schools and barely a quarter of the students is a sector being hollowed out from the inside.

The financing figures explain why, though they come with a warning label, since most are dated. Government spending on education stood at less than 2% of GDP in 2020, among the lowest rates in the world, according to the World Bank and the Centre for Lebanese Studies. Over the 2011–2022 period, households shouldered an estimated 47% of total education spending, one of the highest private burdens anywhere, while international donors covered a further 11%, or some USD 4.7 billion. A state that pays for less than a fifth of its own education system has already ceded much of the control of it to parents and foreign funders.

And the families now expected to carry that burden are far poorer than they were. Lebanon's poverty rate more than tripled, from 12% in 2012 to 44% in 2022, the World Bank reported in 2024. The households that once paid private tuition to avoid the public system are the same households the crisis has since flattened. The result is a squeeze from both ends: a public sector families distrust, and a private sector they can no longer afford.

The reform, such as it can be counted

Against that backdrop, Karami's ministry has moved, and some of the movement is real and quantifiable.

The clearest is teacher pay. Public-school contract teachers, whose wages the currency collapse had rendered close to worthless, saw their hourly rates raised and a productivity bonus folded into their compensation, delivered largely through the Transition Resilience Education Fund (TREF). Managed by the ministry since 2022 with UNICEF and international donors, TREF reaches some 12,500 teachers across 1,237 public schools, a concrete, countable intervention keeping the public system staffed.

There is a budgetary signal, too. The draft 2026 budget reportedly ranks education among the state's top spending priorities, placed ahead of health, internal security and defence. On paper, that is a statement of intent that matches Karami's rhetoric.

But the majority of this rests on soft ground. A productivity bonus routed through a donor-funded mechanism is not the same as a structural raise written into the state payroll. It lasts as long as the donors do. And a draft budget is a proposal, not a law, a ranking of priorities that means nothing until it is passed and, more importantly, executed. Which leads us to the problem that swallows the whole story.

The blackout

Between 2017 and 2021, the state did something that, by its own standards, resembled transparency: it published detailed budget-execution data, not just what the state planned to spend, but what it actually spent. Since 2021, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), that window has closed. The Finance Ministry's website has been offline for extended stretches, and many of the reports that once let outsiders track public spending are no longer accessible.

This is the hinge of the entire question. A budget that allocates money to education is a promise. Execution data is the receipt. Without the receipt, there is no way to know whether the promise was kept, whether the money reaching education in the draft 2026 budget will actually arrive in classrooms, or whether it will be announced, celebrated, and quietly not spent.

The tools required to verify reform, in other words, have been switched off. Karami may be laying foundations. The public simply has no instrument left to check whether concrete is being poured or whether the site is abandoned the moment the ceremony ends. The exam cancellations compound the gap: whatever their merits as a response to the war, they mean that even the crude annual measure of what the system produces, the pass rates, the regional breakdowns, the raw output of the schools, has now been suspended two years running. A state that stops publishing its spending and stops testing its students has, functionally, stopped generating evidence about itself.

The clock, not the visibility

There is one new variable, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. Lebanon's parliamentary elections, due in May 2026, were postponed. In March 2026, as the war with Israel escalated, Parliament voted to extend its own term by two years, pushing the vote to 2028. For a reform agenda, that ought to be good news: Karami's government, and the reformist window it represents, just gained an unexpected runway. Foundations need time to set, and the clock was just wound forward.

The additional time was seized, not earned at the ballot box, an unelected mandate prolonged under wartime conditions, opposed by much of the political spectrum. A reform government with two extra years and no fresh democratic authorization is still a government whose legitimacy rests on emergency. More to the point, the extra time changes only the clock, not the visibility. A longer runway is worthless if no one can see what is being built on it. The budget data is still dark. The evidence base is still frozen at 2023–2024 on enrollment and 2021 on spending.

So the honest verdict is a conditional one. Karami's framing, that she is preparing the ground for a successor to build on, can only come true under conditions that do not yet exist. The groundwork survives a change of minister only if it is locked into published law and executed budget lines, the kind of institutional record that outlives the individual who set it. Right now, the public record cannot confirm that any of it is. What can be documented is a public system shedding students, a state financing less than a fifth of it, a population too poor to pay for the alternative, and a government that has stopped publishing the numbers that would let anyone judge the rest.

Reform and rescue can look alike from the outside. For the past two years, the data that would tell them apart has been missing.