About BITS Lebanon

Lebanon is already online. Its public data is not.

At the start of 2025, 5.34 million people in Lebanon were using the internet — 91.6% of the country. Almost everyone here carries the internet in their pocket.

Yet on the United Nations' 2024 E-Government Development Index, Lebanon ranks 126th of 193 countries, and 13th in its own region. The gap between those two numbers is the whole reason this app exists.

It is not that the information does not exist. Registers are published. Records are kept. But they arrive as scanned pages and locked formats, scattered and hard to read, in a form that answers a question only if you already know where to look. Public data that cannot be searched is public in name only.

We are late. We are not stuck.

Lebanon's e-government score rose from 0.5273 in 2022 to 0.5449 in 2024. It is a small movement. It is still movement, and it happened during years that were hard on this country by any measure.

BITS Lebanon began in 2018 as a family project: one electoral register, made searchable because nobody else had. It has grown into a platform for Lebanese public data — searchable, comparable across years, and readable on a phone in Arabic, English or French.

Where we are going

The electoral registry is the first dataset, not the last. The intention is a single place where Lebanese public information can be found and understood: registries, vehicles, elections, and whatever else can be opened up responsibly — with the analysis that turns a list of records into something a person, a journalist or a municipality can actually use.

One country, one place to look. That is the whole ambition, and it is a long way off. We would rather build it a dataset at a time and be honest about what is not ready yet.

Figures: DataReportal, Digital 2025: Lebanon (January 2025); United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, E-Government Survey 2024.