LEBANON - As schools across the Middle East continue to recover from years of crisis, conflict, and disruption, educators are increasingly confronting a difficult reality: academic recovery cannot occur without first addressing student well-being.
In Lebanon, where children have endured overlapping crises, the emotional impact on students has become impossible to ignore.
In response to these growing challenges, BuzzGage, a platform focused on student well-being, engagement, and social-emotional development, has expanded its work to include a post-crisis well-being framework tailored to schools across the region.
Working with education systems in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, the company says the initiative was developed after witnessing how conflict, displacement, instability, and disrupted education continued affecting students long after crises subsided.
“We saw that students in the region, where education was disrupted and students had to study online, were still carrying the effects of those experiences,” says Mohammad Chehab, managing director and co-founder of BuzzGage. “What we’re offering is a diagnostic lens into the well-being of students.”
A Six-Pillar Model
At the core of the initiative is a six-pillar post-crisis wellbeing model designed to help schools identify emotional and psychological conditions that often remain invisible inside classrooms.
The framework focuses on six key constructs shaping student recovery: sense of safety and predictability, displacement and disruption, grief and loss processing, exposure to distressing information, hope and agency, and identity threat and stigma sensitivity.
According to Chehab, schools often lack visibility into these dimensions despite their direct impact on learning, engagement, and belonging. The system, in this case schools, often has no visibility over these pillars.
Using an anonymous, age-calibrated assessment tool, students answer questions that are then benchmarked collectively against globally recognized evidence-based frameworks.
The process is designed not to diagnose individual students, but to provide schools with broader insights into the emotional conditions affecting their communities. From there, action plans are developed.
The framework is also intentionally non-clinical. Rather than focusing on diagnosis, it aims to help schools create safer and more responsive learning environments through leadership decisions, counselling support, inclusive school culture, and stronger communication systems.
Lebanon: "A Special Case"
The initiative comes at a particularly critical moment for Lebanon, where students have spent years navigating compounding crises. Unlike countries facing a single emergency event, Lebanon’s younger generation has experienced repeated instability with little time to recover between shocks.
“Lebanon is a special case,” Chehab says. “It’s not going through one crisis, but a compounding crisis, so students have been exposed to a lot of crises since 2019.”
That prolonged exposure makes the six-pillar model especially relevant in Lebanese schools.
One of the framework’s central pillars, sense of safety and predictability, reflects a growing challenge for students who have become accustomed to uncertainty. Economic instability, school closures, political unrest, and regional conflict have disrupted routines that are essential for emotional security and learning development.
Another pillar, displacement and disruption, addresses students whose education and social environments have been interrupted by conflict, migration, or prolonged instability. Even students who remain physically present in schools may still experience emotional displacement due to constant change and uncertainty.
The framework also examines grief and loss processing, an issue affecting many Lebanese families who have faced financial collapse, emigration, deaths, or community fragmentation over recent years.
Implementation in Lebanon may face obstacles beyond resources alone.
Chehab points to cultural stigma surrounding mental health as one of the biggest barriers across the region. Discussions around emotional well-being are still often viewed through a clinical or social stigma lens, making schools hesitant to openly address such challenges.
By framing wellbeing as part of educational development rather than psychiatric intervention, the six-pillar model attempts to make these conversations more accessible for schools, families, and policymakers alike.
As Lebanon’s education sector continues searching for ways to rebuild after years of crisis, the framework offers an approach rooted not only in academic recovery but in understanding what students have experienced emotionally along the way.
For many schools, that visibility may become just as important as grades or attendance in determining whether students are truly recovering.
