Tunisia: Unemployed Graduates, a Symptom of an Economy Lacking Reforms
27 November 2014
Read by 1955 persons
Slim Shimi, despite holding a master's degree in geography, has been working as a café server for five years. His situation is symptomatic of Tunisia's economic problems, where over a third of the unemployed hold university degrees.
"There are graduates like me who have become street vendors, others who engage in smuggling. We have no choice," says Slim.
"Come back in the afternoon," adds this 36-year-old who works in a café in downtown Tunis. "You'll see unemployed graduates from engineering schools, or in computer science and communication. Fields that are supposed to be in demand in the job market."
According to official figures, Tunisia has more than 600,000 unemployed (15% of the active population), of whom 240,000 are higher education graduates.
Every year, nearly 60,000 people graduate from Tunisian universities. And those with degrees in humanities or Arabic struggle to find work, due to structural problems that continue to fuel social tensions.
Nearly four years after the revolution that overthrew the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a revolution largely motivated by unemployment and poverty, no major reforms have been undertaken.
While socio-economic issues were a major theme during the October legislative and November 23 presidential campaigns, the programs of the various parties and candidates remained very vague on these issues.
- 'Mismatch' -
Jean-Luc Bernasconi, chief economist at the World Bank in Tunis, stresses the urgency of correcting the "mismatch" between university education and the job market.
"The revolution is an ongoing process, certainly," he tells AFP. "But the economic issue, perhaps neglected or set aside initially, must be tackled head-on because the economic challenges are there and are worsening in some cases."
According to him, the "difficult integration" of graduates into the job market is mainly due to the lack of training targeting the skills sought by companies.
"Companies complain about not finding skills, so there is qualitative work to be done at the higher education level" and in vocational training, he explains.
Therefore, according to the World Bank, most jobs created in Tunisia are low-skilled or unskilled (assembly, sewing workshops, etc.) and cannot satisfy the hundreds of thousands of unemployed higher education graduates.
"People with degrees end up in jobs, in skills for which they have not been trained; this is what we call mismatch or underemployment," explains Mr. Bernasconi.
And faced with the private sector's inability to offer jobs to higher education graduates, the public sector has become the only source of employment for these graduates," the Bank regrets in a recent report.
Therefore, business leaders wishing to recruit locally the skills they need must themselves invest the time and money needed to train their new recruits.
"It's not easy to create this added value in Tunisia. We had to train our engineers to be able to develop value-added solutions (...). What we want is for the authorities to take charge of this training," laments Mohamed Chouchane, director of NGI Maghreb, a company specializing in mapping and satellite navigation.
The diagnosis is the same for Slim, the café boy: "This is explained by 20, 30, 40 years of accumulated errors by the State (...), which unfortunately continues in its errors because there is no clear program."
Jeuneafrique.com
Published on November 21, 2014.
Posted online on November 27, 2014.
"There are graduates like me who have become street vendors, others who engage in smuggling. We have no choice," says Slim.
"Come back in the afternoon," adds this 36-year-old who works in a café in downtown Tunis. "You'll see unemployed graduates from engineering schools, or in computer science and communication. Fields that are supposed to be in demand in the job market."
According to official figures, Tunisia has more than 600,000 unemployed (15% of the active population), of whom 240,000 are higher education graduates.
Every year, nearly 60,000 people graduate from Tunisian universities. And those with degrees in humanities or Arabic struggle to find work, due to structural problems that continue to fuel social tensions.
Nearly four years after the revolution that overthrew the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a revolution largely motivated by unemployment and poverty, no major reforms have been undertaken.
While socio-economic issues were a major theme during the October legislative and November 23 presidential campaigns, the programs of the various parties and candidates remained very vague on these issues.
- 'Mismatch' -
Jean-Luc Bernasconi, chief economist at the World Bank in Tunis, stresses the urgency of correcting the "mismatch" between university education and the job market.
"The revolution is an ongoing process, certainly," he tells AFP. "But the economic issue, perhaps neglected or set aside initially, must be tackled head-on because the economic challenges are there and are worsening in some cases."
According to him, the "difficult integration" of graduates into the job market is mainly due to the lack of training targeting the skills sought by companies.
"Companies complain about not finding skills, so there is qualitative work to be done at the higher education level" and in vocational training, he explains.
Therefore, according to the World Bank, most jobs created in Tunisia are low-skilled or unskilled (assembly, sewing workshops, etc.) and cannot satisfy the hundreds of thousands of unemployed higher education graduates.
"People with degrees end up in jobs, in skills for which they have not been trained; this is what we call mismatch or underemployment," explains Mr. Bernasconi.
And faced with the private sector's inability to offer jobs to higher education graduates, the public sector has become the only source of employment for these graduates," the Bank regrets in a recent report.
Therefore, business leaders wishing to recruit locally the skills they need must themselves invest the time and money needed to train their new recruits.
"It's not easy to create this added value in Tunisia. We had to train our engineers to be able to develop value-added solutions (...). What we want is for the authorities to take charge of this training," laments Mohamed Chouchane, director of NGI Maghreb, a company specializing in mapping and satellite navigation.
The diagnosis is the same for Slim, the café boy: "This is explained by 20, 30, 40 years of accumulated errors by the State (...), which unfortunately continues in its errors because there is no clear program."
Jeuneafrique.com
Published on November 21, 2014.
Posted online on November 27, 2014.
