Executive Summary
Following 2011, Syria spent over a decade being torn apart. Torn apart physically and torn apart figuratively. The economic devastation wrought by the civil war was itself preceded by decades of a corrosive political economy that saw the institutions as well as the soft and physical infrastructure required for a sustainable nation state to never be consolidated or even built in the first place. The product of this is a Syria that, economically, is on its knees.
A civil war like Syria’s rips a country apart in far more ways than just devastated buildings and crippled industries. But rebuilding, or building, legitimate institutions of governance and order, soft and hard infrastructure, and systems that enable individuals to advance their livelihoods required for an economic reconstruction rebuilds far more than an economy. A successful, sustainable and comprehensive economic reconstruction addresses, whether directly or through second- or third-order effects, many of the social cleavages caused by an era of conflict like that Syria suffered. The operative word there is comprehensive. Reconstructions that benefit a minority while others are left in the cold are not rebuilding anything except a path back into conflict.
Building a roadmap for such a comprehensive reconstruction is the objective of this essay series. The roadmap will unfold over three parts, each presenting the key bottlenecks that are preventing Syria from achieving such a reconstruction and proposing how to overcome these bottlenecks. The entire series is deliberately geared to be of real utility to wide range of stakeholders engaged in/with Syria aside from the government alone. Foreign envoys and embassies designing their engagement strategies, INGOs and development agencies devising their programmatic strategies, public and private investors and financiers looking to ascertain the risks surrounding their prospective projects and thus what best practices they should demand as terms of their engagement – all of these stakeholders and more will be able to lean on this series as they chart their path ahead in Syria.
Part 1 (“Pillar I: Institutional Foundations of the State”) is the most important pillar of the roadmap, as its bottlenecks must be addressed first to enable addressing those of Pillars II and III. Pillar I laid out the platform of governance – spanning normative and procedural imperatives – yet to be established in Syria that is the essential substrate for any reconstruction to emerge from and sustain. Six bottlenecks and their solutions were examined:
1) A published national vision
2) A bureaucracy designed to serve the public
3) Verifiable transparency
4) Separation of powers, in transition and after
5) Technical roles and technical people
6) Clear government communication and information environment
Part 2 (“Pillar II: Economic Enablers – Regulation, Market Structure, and Infrastructure”) laid out the key systems that must be built off the foundation of Pillar I to enable the resources required for the reconstruction to flow and be protected. If Pillar I is the central nervous system and immune system of the reconstruction, Pillar II is the circulatory system – the arteries and veins. Five bottlenecks, and how to overcome them, constituted the analysis of this pillar:
7) A functional banking system
8) Electricity capacity
9) Property rights and contract enforcement
10) Physical and soft trade and customs infrastructure
11) An empowered Syrian private sector
This part, Part 3 (“Pillar III: Growth That Reaches – Human Capital, Jobs, and Local Government”), concerns how to empower Syrians with agency, and thus to be the agents the reconstruction needs – not only in terms of individual skills and value creation opportunities, but also having the authority for the crucial local-level problem solving required. If Pillar I is the central nervous system and immune system, and Pillar II is the circulatory system, Pillar III is the reproductive system – the ability of the organism to sustain life. Three bottlenecks, and the paths to overcoming them, are examined here:
12) Rebuilt education system and skilled workforce
13) Job creation
14) Calibrated responsibilities between municipalities, governorates, and the central state
Part 3 ends with a proposal for the creation of a small body, a “Delivery Unit”, to coordinate and guide the reconstruction’s administration on a macro level and conduct the iterative problem-solving and reflective accountability mechanisms ongoing to ensure its path remains correct.
If there is a unifying perspective throughout the series, it is urgency. The government has made real gains, particularly in the relationship building required for the partnerships that will be crucial to Syria’s reconstruction. But the challenge is now the domestic front and the far harder but far more critical work of compromise, sharing, and systems building – work that often doesn’t provide instant payoffs like a headline-grabbing sanctions removal announcement, but work that provides the foundation for a Syria that moves away from conflict, not towards it. Without being alarmist, time is not on Syria’s side – the foundations for addressing the root causes of the highly visible fractures in the country, building the trust between communities and between people and government required to prevent those fractures deepening into true cleavages, are yet to be laid. The 24-month timeframe of the programme – unlocking certain bottlenecks and establishing significant tangible momentum across the others – is thus by no means arbitrary, but essential. Yet the wager underlying this series is a positive one. Once these bottlenecks are addressed, Syria is positioned to reclaim its role as the political, economic, and financial centre of the Levant, and to convert a decade of destruction into a generation of construction. This is one of the largest reconstruction and investment opportunities of this generation, and we are bullish on what comes next.
Pillar III: Growth That Reaches – Human Capital, Jobs, and Local Government
The first two pillars concern the norms, capacities, and rules that render recovery possible. The third concerns whether that recovery reaches all Syrians, or instead divides them into winners and losers, the latter outcome portending a fragile and unsustainable reconstruction. Three factors will prove decisive here: the human capital pipeline, which determines who gains agency within the recovery and from it; the job creation mandate, which determines whether ordinary citizens can build a livelihood; and the mandate and capacities for local government, which determines whether the recovery reaches the territories at the ground level. Without progress in this third pillar, the political durability of the transition will remain in question regardless of how well the others perform.
Bottleneck 12: Rebuilt education system and skilled workforce
Syria’s universities, schools, and technical institutes are damaged, and many of the country’s ablest professors have emigrated. The professional class that administered the country through the 2000s now largely reside in Berlin, Toronto, Riyadh, Dubai, and Beirut, while the school-aged children presently in classrooms have spent most of their lives within a war-disrupted education system. Even with sanctions lifted and capital returning, no reconstruction succeeds without the human capital to design, manage, and operate it over the long term.
The talent exists, but much of it remains latent, unrefined for deployment, or resident abroad within the diaspora. Both the diaspora, addressed initially in Bottleneck 5, and the domestic population, whose access to education and certification has been disrupted for over a decade, require a working architecture to convert that capacity into something the recovery can use.
A programme addressing the reconstruction’s immediate technical needs would operate across three layers. At the apex, the senior diaspora returnees of Bottleneck 5 would form much of the technical leadership of the ministries, designing and managing reform across the system. In the middle layer, Damascus-requested secondments through the World Bank, UNDP, IMF, and partner-government programmes would place Arabic-speaking mid-career professionals from the region or Arab diaspora within Syrian ministries as embedded advisers on twelve-to-eighteen-month rotations, under explicit obligations to transfer knowledge to their Syrian counterparts. At the base, the restoration of Technical and Vocational Education and Training would prioritize certifying and upskilling Syrians in the sectors reconstruction will most require (electrical, civil and mechanical engineering, construction trades and project management, healthcare and its administration, agriculture, and digital infrastructure), toward a target of fifty thousand certified technicians over thirty-six months – a figure sized against the authors’ reconstruction labor demand estimates.
Alongside this technical effort sits university reform: a published curriculum framework (national standards per discipline, with particular emphasis on employer engagement on designing standards and courses pertaining to the key reconstruction sectors outlined just above) aligned to the labor market the recovery is building; foreign-credential recognition for Syrian academics returning from abroad (the reform already noted in Bottleneck 5); and funding for the physical reconstruction of the major universities that suffered physical damage (Aleppo and Homs (formerly Al-Baath) universities) and modernization of facilities across the remaining major universities of Damascus and Latakia (formerly Tishreen). Primary and secondary education, for its part, requires teacher training, curriculum and textbook reform, and the gradual reintegration, with the psychosocial support it necessitates, of the children whose schooling displacement interrupted.
This is the longest-horizon constraint in the programme. Banking can be unblocked within months and customs reform can show results within two years, but a functioning education system and sufficiently equipped workforce takes a decade to rebuild. Its foundations – the leadership architecture, the secondment programme, the TVET targets, the curriculum framework, and teacher capacity – must be laid now, even as their full effects will only unfold across the decade that follows.
Responsible bodies: the Ministry of Higher Education (universities and credential recognition), the Ministry of Education (primary and secondary), the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor (vocational training and apprenticeship), and the General Secretariat of the Presidency (cross-ministerial coordination of the diaspora and secondment pipelines). Status quo: technical and vocational training system damaged and not yet restructured; foreign academic credentials recognized case-by-case; no published curriculum framework aligned to the reconstruction labor market; major universities operating below capacity with degraded faculty and physical infrastructure.
Bottleneck 13: Job creation
Approximately ninety percent of the Syrian population lives below the poverty line, and even optimistic UNDP recovery scenarios (to pre-2011 GDP levels) require at least a decade. Jobs are one of the absolute primary means by which citizens tangibly feel a recovery and thus are key to generating public confidence in a post-conflict transition.
Syria must create roughly two to three million formal jobs (a figure that derives from a labour force of approximately 6.5 million against modelled unemployment and displacement gaps that no post-2011 household survey has updated, and is indicative rather than precise) over five years to reduce poverty meaningfully, a figure the reconstruction deals, Gulf investments, and energy consortia will not approach. The requisite volume will come instead from SMEs, agribusiness, and the graduation of the informal economy into the formal one, which is why the private-sector constraint of Bottleneck 11 sits directly upstream of this one. The SMEs that must grow to create those jobs are the same SMEs that need a working institutional environment to scale.
The intervention rests on three mechanisms.
1) A national job-creation mandate, published as an explicit target (two to three million formal jobs over five years, disaggregated by sector and governorate), owned by a named cabinet minister and subject to quarterly public reporting on the same dashboard system as Bottleneck 3.
2) The $500 million SME wholesale credit facility introduced in Bottleneck 11, channelled through Syrian banks once correspondent relationships are restored, with explicit allocations to the highest job-creating sectors: agribusiness, light manufacturing, and construction.
3) A simplified tax regime for newly registered firms, paired with the bureaucratic reform of Bottleneck 2. Registration would conclude within a single day. For the firm’s first three years, a simplified regime would apply: a fixed rate on turnover rather than a calculated rate on profit, a single annual filing rather than several, a standardized turnover-only return rather than full accounts (which involve a profit-and-loss statement, balance sheet, complete income and expenditure records, depreciation calculations, etc.), and a single point of contact at the tax authority rather than several agencies. The firm would then graduate automatically into the standard regime.
Agribusiness needs a named sub-target. Syria’s pre-war advantage in olives, citrus, wheat, and pistachio, set against the 2025 wheat deficit of 2.73 million tonnes, makes the sector the largest near-term import-substitution opportunity, the largest rural employer, and the natural anchor for the trade and customs reforms of Bottleneck 10. A dedicated agricultural allocation within the Bottleneck 11 SME credit facility, paired with Ghab Plain irrigation rehabilitation and the trade infrastructure of Bottleneck 10, would return hundreds of thousands of rural Syrians to work within twenty-four months, on land that already exists.
Women need the same explicit treatment, for an arithmetic reason before a normative one. Female labor-force participation in Syria stands at roughly thirteen percent, among the lowest rates in the world and about a quarter of the global average of fifty-one percent. A target of two to three million formal jobs cannot be met while half the working-age population remains outside the labor market by default. The same gap appears in governance, where the administration has drawn sustained criticism for the thin representation of women in the cabinet, in its delegations, and at its investment events. These two deficits are connected: a state that does not visibly include women in its own ranks means a societal norm of female workforce participation is harder to inculcate.
The corrective is a named female-employment sub-target within the job mandate, reported on the same dashboard as Bottleneck 3, paired with the measures that participation requires: childcare, safe transport, and an explicit allocation to women-led firms within the SME credit facility of Bottleneck 11. Women’s employment is a structural condition of the jobs target, not a question of fairness to be revisited once growth arrives.
The discipline of a published target matters more than the headline figure. A government that names “two million jobs by 2031” and reports against it quarterly can be held to account in ways that a pledge merely to “support employment” never permits. Rwanda did so through its Imihigo system; South Korea did so through the Saemaul Undong rural employment targets of the 1970s. Model frameworks are not scarce. What Syria has to supply is the discipline to carry transparency and accountability through the whole process.
Responsible bodies: the Ministry of Economy and Industry (national job creation mandate), the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor (employment data and SME registration), the Central Bank of Syria (SME credit channel), and the Ministry of Agriculture (agribusiness sub-target). Status quo: no published national job creation target; SME credit channels disrupted by sanctions-era banking dislocation, currently being rebuilt; no formalization pathway from the informal economy to the formal one.
Bottleneck 14: Calibrated responsibilities between municipalities, governorates, and the central state
The thirteen constraints above are addressed, almost without exception, to ministries in Damascus. But the recovery the constraints describe is delivered across the country, at various levels. A construction permit is issued by a municipality, not a ministry; a returning family is housed in a governorate, not a cabinet; an industrial line is energized at a substation in Aleppo or Homs, not at a desk in the capital. Damascus can design pillars of the recovery, but it cannot deliver it.
Syria entered the transition with one of the region’s more centralized administrative architectures. Law 107 of 2011 nominally devolved authority to elected local councils, and in February 2026 the Local Administration Ministry’s Decision 13 delegated broad ministerial powers to governors. However, governors remain appointed from Damascus, municipal own-source revenue is negligible, and local administrations carry neither the fiscal base nor the technical capacity to execute at the scale reconstruction demands. The result is a delivery bottleneck sitting underneath every other constraint: the bureaucratic reform of Bottleneck 2, the property certification of Bottleneck 9, the industrial-zone electrification of Bottleneck 8, and the firm formation of Bottleneck 11 all terminate at a municipal counter that lacks the staff, the budget, and in several governorates the legitimacy, to carry them.
Legitimacy is the second face of this constraint, and the one most often left out of the economic conversation. Who is appointed to govern a governorate is read, inside Syria and abroad, as a signal of whether the settlement is inclusive or majoritarian. A governor or local council that visibly represents the community it administers narrows the gap between announcement and implementation.
The third face is absorption. Around 1.3 million Syrians returned from abroad in 2025, reducing the refugee population from roughly six million to 4.9 million, with a further two million internally displaced Syrians also returning home, and returns continued into 2026 to reach some 550,000 by mid-May, driven less by confidence in Syria than by deteriorating conditions in Lebanon. These returnees are not the credentialed diaspora of Bottleneck 5. They arrive to neighborhoods in ruins, to patchy electricity, water, and health care, and frequently without the civil documents that property and services require. Where they live and what services receive them is a municipal question before it is a national one. A return that fails locally does not stay local. It metastasises through the country.
The required reform runs along four lines.
1) Fiscal decentralisation comes first: a defined own-source revenue base for municipalities and governorates paired with transparent, annual budgets allocated by Damascus to them devised by a published formula (population, damage index, poverty rate) published under the contract-transparency regime of Bottleneck 3, so that local administrations can fund their own delivery rather than petition Damascus for it.
2) Local capacity comes second: an extension of the diaspora and secondment pipeline of Bottlenecks 5 and 12 to the governorate level, placing technical staff where permits, land, and services are administered.
3) Representative appointment comes third: published criteria for the selection of governors and senior local officials, with explicit attention to the representation of each governorate’s communities, on the logic that representation is an input to investor confidence and not only to reconciliation.
4) A returnee-absorption mandate comes fourth: a per-governorate plan for housing, documentation, and basic services, costed and assigned to a named official, with civil-registry repair feeding the documentation an absorbed returnee needs to work, lease, and claim.
There is precedent for all of this. Indonesia’s post-Aceh decentralization rebuilt local administrative legitimacy alongside physical reconstruction; Colombia paired municipal land restitution with local service delivery for returning displaced populations. In both cases, a recovery managed entirely from the capital struggled to extend past it.
Responsible bodies: the Ministry of Local Administration and Environment, the Presidency (governor appointments), the Ministry of Finance (fiscal transfers) Status quo: governors centrally appointed; municipal own-source revenue negligible; no published formula for central-to-local transfers; no representative-appointment criteria published; returnee absorption handled ad hoc and largely by UN agencies rather than by resourced local administrations.
Marshalling This Recovery at the Top
Three pillars, fourteen constraints, and twenty-four months of concentrated work. The architecture to direct that effort can be drawn from the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU), developed by Malaysia between 2009 and 2018 and studied extensively by the World Bank. The model, inspired by PEMANDU and adapted to the Syrian case, rests on:
- A small Delivery Unit, administratively housed under the Secretary-General of the Presidency, with ring-fenced authority to convene ministers, set National Priority Area (NPA) KPIs, publish weekly tracking data, and escalate delivery blockers to the President without ministerial intervention
- A finite set of NPAs, mapped to named ministerial accountability, that are directly structured around the fourteen bottlenecks discussed in this essay
- Six-to-eight-week working laboratories to design the delivery plan for each National Priority Area (KPIs, budget, particular ministerial accountability).
- Weekly tracking of each NPA’s publicly published KPIs, quarterly NPA-specific problem-solving meetings, and an annual report on the overall NPA performance audited by an external firm under Agreed-Upon Procedures.
The resources it demands are modest: a team of fifteen to twenty and $3 to $5 million annually, well under 0.1 percent of the budget the unit would coordinate.
This is the smallest administrative apparatus capable of running a programme of this scale, and the most extensively studied. The reasons the delivery-unit model has succeeded where it has been applied (Malaysia’s PEMANDU, the United Kingdom under Tony Blair, Rwanda under Paul Kagame) are not particular to those countries; they come down to a small team accountable for delivery, and independent audit of the unit’s own claims.
One question reveals most of whether the programme is working: by the end of year 1, how many of the pledged foreign investments have signed term sheets, drawn down capital, broken ground, and begun operating? Published quarterly, disaggregated by sector and naming the parties and counterparties involved, that figure is the most informative public data point available on the lion’s share of the programme, an indicator of whether most of the other constraints are moving, and whether the recovery is progressing from rhetoric to delivery.
None of this is a technical problem. The delivery model is easily understood, the comparative precedents exist, and the financing is, in principle, available. The case for the center devolving a level of authority to enable the overall task is perfectly straightforward: a recovery captured early and monopolized by the center is the more dangerous outcome over the medium to long term, for leaders and citizens alike. The partners, the capital, and the assistance are all in place. What remains is narrow and definable: fourteen constraints addressed (or heavily progressed in cases like Bottleneck 12) within twenty-four months, run through a delivery system that already exists in model form for Syria to readily adopt. The recovery will not arrive by accident, nor will it fail because the problems defy solution.
Syria today stands in its strongest position since independence. The sanctions architecture has been dismantled, capital and diplomacy have reoriented toward Damascus rather than against it, and a leadership guided by the lessons of comparable reform experiences elsewhere has assumed direction of what comes next. In any honest reading of the next twenty years in the region, Syria is positioned to reclaim its role as the political, economic, and financial centre of the Levant. The country holds the geography, the human capital, the resource base, and now the political mandate to convert a decade of destruction into a generation of construction. The window that has opened is not incremental. This is the largest investment and reconstruction opportunity of this generation, and one of the rare moments when a country of Syria’s stature is rebuildable, financeable, and willing all at once. We are bullish on what comes next.