Education and employment are key factors in building up the new democracy in Tunisia, and working for a prosperous future of the country, the interim Tunisian government is preparing a new regional project on human capital development in cooperation with the ETF.

A high level seminar on “Employability and regional development”, held  in the capital Tunis on 4 July 2011 prepared the ground for the project. This seminar gathered the Tunisian Minister for Employment and Vocational Training, Saïd Aïdi, President of External Relations at the European Economic and Social Committee, Alexander Boyle, Co-President of the Euro-Mediterranean Regional and Local Assembly (ARLEM) and Member of the Committee of the Regions, Luc van den Brande, ETF Director Madlen Serban and representatives from France, Belgium and ministries of Tunisia.

The seminar focused on issues of multi level governance and social dialogue for an integrated and partnership based approach to the developments at regional level in Tunisia. Following the seminar, the ETF experts and the central ministry's representatives started working in the region Mednine in the southern part of Tunisia at the border with Libya.“In cooperation with national and local partners, we try help implementing the national emergency job plan at regional level after it was launched at national level in March,” ETF country manager for Tunisia, Marie Dorleans, explains.

In addition, and in a more mid to long term perspective, ETF is identifying a multi-year project with the aim of supporting human capital development at the regional level, in response to regional economic development needs, in line with the regional VET development schemes that were developed by the ministry in other regions.“The regional approach is the safest way to ensure that education and training respond to the human resources and skills needs of local economic actors, but we face a number of challenges” Marie Dorleans says. In the severe economic context, when the economic growth has dropped from 5 per cent to less than 1 per cent, and especially in a region affected by the war in Libya, it is hard to get the business sector to focus on human resources issues - priority logically goes for financial and economic considerations-.  There is limited tradition for cooperation and social partnerships, and in addition many people are little committed, as they are awaiting the first democratic elections to take place on 23 October.“ Through the project 2011-2013, we seek to develop an integrated and partnership-based approach to the development in the region of mednine, and hopefully the activities, process and results will also inspire the current reflection of the ministry on regionalisation schemes in the human resource field,” says Marie Dorleans.