HARETNA

HARETNA is a community-driven urban recovery program in three of Lebanon's most pressured neighborhoods, Greater Beirut, Tripoli, and Sidon, targeting the intersection of economic collapse, refugee presence, and gendered inequality that defines those neighborhoods at this moment in the country's history. The program is led by the Norwegian Refugee Council with COSV, the Tripoli Entrepreneurs Club, and The Lebanese Women Democratic Gathering as partners, funded jointly by the French Development Agency (AFD) and Denmark's development cooperation (Danida) on a total budget above EUR 12 million. The work is set up to run from 2023 through 2027; my involvement on the COSV side ran from project start through 2026.

HARETNA's structure is built around three coupled outcomes. The first is direct improvement in living conditions for vulnerable residents, Lebanese and Syrian-refugee households alike, by strengthening their access to essential urban services and infrastructure inside neighborhoods that the formal state has largely withdrawn from. The second is social cohesion across communities that have been told for years they are in competition for the same shrinking resources, with a specific focus on empowering women and the most vulnerable to claim rights and access protection services. The third is socio-economic inclusion through job creation and income-generating activities that do not depend on the formal labour market's recovery. Each outcome is measurable on its own, and the program's design pushes the partners to deliver them as a single integrated package rather than as three separate verticals.

On HARETNA, my work concentrated on translation across the full documentation stack the program produced. The reports that COSV submitted to AFD and Danida every quarter, the narrative updates that partners exchanged across the four-organization implementation, the visibility content the program released about its three target neighborhoods: I did not draft most of this material, I translated it. The work was to take other people's writing in one language and produce versions in the other that the donor side and the partner side would each accept without flagging substantive shifts. Most of the project's bilingual documentation passed through me on its way between languages.

HARETNA's two-donor structure meant every project document had to land cleanly with AFD, with Danida, and with the partners and communities reading their own language versions, all on the same evidence. My job as translator was to make sure the version any reader saw matched the version the other readers saw on the parts that mattered, and to let small register differences fall where they would. The Architect AI's verification pipeline does the same thing in code: a piece of work has to clear different evaluative readings simultaneously without losing its meaning across them.