Lebanon's Ministry of State for Technology & AI — A New Ministry Backed by a $150M World Bank Digitisation Loan

In 2025 Lebanon carved a Ministry of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence out of an existing state ministry, naming economist Kamal Shehadi (former chairman of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority) as minister — reported as the country's first new independent ministry since 1993, with a draft law to formalise it awaiting parliamentary approval.

In April 2025, Shehadi announced a strategy backed by roughly $30-50 million over two years, aimed at national digital-ID rollout, digitising government payments, and building legal and technical AI infrastructure.

Digital projects — including health-record and civil-registry digitisation — were reported already under way in more than half of Lebanon's ministries. The commitment was reinforced on 10 August 2026, when Lebanon's Finance Minister and the World Bank's regional director signed a $150 million loan for a Digital Acceleration Project (approved by World Bank directors in January 2026), intended to fund secure government data infrastructure, cybersecurity and telecoms upgrades, and a shift from paper-based and in-person ministry visits to digital services.

As of this writing the practice is institutional groundwork and funding, not a deployed, measured AI system: no service-level usage, error-rate, or cost-savings figures have been published, so the case should be read as an early-stage governance and financing commitment rather than a proven public-value outcome — undertaken against the backdrop of Lebanon's economic crisis since 2019.