Local Urban Observatory at Sin El Fil Municipality – Lebanon: Challenges & Achievements Mounia Bedran Saba Manager, GIS Consulting Khatib & Alami, CEC, Lebanon Email: mbedran@kacec.com Mounia Bedran Saba Manager, GIS Consulting Khatib & Alami, CEC Email: mbedran@kacec.com Victoria Zwein Municipality Council Member Sin El Fil Municipality Email: vzwein@gmail.com In the context of implementing the Urban Indicators Programme and the UN Global Urban Observatory Network (GUO), the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), the Arab Towns Organization (ATO) and Sin El Fil Municipality have established the Sin El-Fil Local Urban Observatory in August 2000. Urban indicators include information about poverty, environmental degradation, lack of urban services, degeneration of existing infrastructure, and the lack of access to land and adequate shelter. This paper discusses the challenges faced in implementing a GIS-based urban database for the analysis and management of the urban indicator data. It also discusses how GIS can provide a new geographic perspective to the Municipality by geo-referencing tabular databases (surveys and administrative data) collected and maintained in separate non-GIS databases. Having built the urban database, Key Urban Indicators of the HABITAT Agenda were modeled using ArcGIS’s Model Builder; the paper presents the achievements of building a decision-aid tool that produced immediate results.