LASERMed (Local action for the socio-economic recovery in the Mediterranean: the cities respond) is ‎funded by the Diputació de Barcelona and led by MedCities in association with the municipalities of Zgharta-Ehden (Lebanon), Oujda (Morocco), Sousse (Tunisia), As Salt (Jordan). 

The project has now ended the diagnosis phase and is entering into the pilot implementation part, which will last until March 2023. The LASERMed project aims to provide tailored support to municipalities in the identification and implementation of local, tangible, and concerted actions to mitigate the effects of the COVID crisis and promote the recovery of strategic sectors with a social value and environmental perspective. The overall objective is to strengthen the role and capacities of local governments to favor a long-term recovery of the citizens’ living conditions.

The four municipalities have now completed the participatory diagnosis phase, during which focus groups, interviews, and meetings have been held with local stakeholders to identify the most urgent actions to be taken in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. The actions identified to put the focus on the social and green sustainability of solutions will be coordinated by the city councils themselves.

In As Salt, a targeted training and mentoring will be offered to home-based local businesses in the fields of food and catering, on the one hand, and young graphic creators featured by skilled youth, on the other. The city council team will also benefit from training on project identification, fund-raising and grant management.

In Zgharta-Ehden, the olive oil-based soap and refashioning sectors will be the main focus of the action, and training on circularity and social and economic sectors will be complementary to technical and business-oriented capacity building.

In Sousse, the intervention will focus on the medina and the handcraft activity that flourishes within its limits. Training and valorisation activities will be implemented, together with a social mediation process, facilitated by experts, to create a good basis for dialogue between the city council and the informal sellers of the neighborhood. Finally, in Oujda, the target group will be the collectors of waste, who work informally and without minimum safety and health conditions. The creation of a workers’ cooperative and the strengthening of capacities for the use of basic safety kits will be the main expected outcome of the action, coupled with an awareness-raising campaign about the need for citizens to recycle.

Different meetings have been held already by MedCities Secretariat with the associated cities in order to fine-tune and finalize the identification of projects and prepare their implementation as of September 2022.