During the 1950s he created an orphanage in Sidon and handed it over to private management. Beyond that, in the 1960s, he founded an agricultural academy in the village of Shoukin in Southern Lebanon to train local farmers in modern methods. It was built partly at his own expense and partly by donations from Lebanese emigres in West Africa. It was destroyed during the Israeli invasion of 1982 but has since been rebuilt, though it has yet to reopen its doors to students. In the 1950s, as Speaker of Parliament, he was one of the prime movers behind the legislation that brought about the Litani Plan, a development project which, though not completed until the present time, would have transformed Lebanon's rural economy.