Education: The Key to Unlocking Tunisia's Prosperity
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," said Nelson Mandela. Indeed, education, one of the pillars of human development, is the springboard for societies to achieve prosperity. Investing in education for all has been one of the first battles won by Tunisia.
On the eve of independence, inequalities in education were enormous, and the illiteracy rate exceeded 84%, affecting almost all women. Today, this rate, which has been continuously declining, has dropped to 17%, while the enrollment rate has reached nearly 80% for young people aged 6 to 24. This is a first bet won, now an acquired fact. Towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Tunisia pursued the path of reforms to modernize its education system and seek better alignment between training and the labor market.
However, the gap between the quality of education provided and the needs of a modern society, open to the contemporary world, as well as those of a labor market subject to the rules of the market economy, quickly became apparent and continued to widen. One of the most instructive illustrations of this observation remains the PISA survey (Programme for International Student Assessment), initiated by the OECD.
By evaluating the ability of 15-year-old students to mobilize their knowledge (science, reading comprehension, and mathematics) to actively participate in life in the context of modern societies, this survey measures their ability to solve unfamiliar situations. Unfortunately, Tunisia has performed poorly, and this has been the case since its accession in 2003, when it was ranked 39th out of 40 countries. In 2015, it was still ranked 65th out of 70, without significant progress. In 2018, it withdrew from the program by decision of the Minister of Education.
However, studies by economists Hanushek and Woessmann have shown that a sustained gain of 100 PISA points could add 1 percentage point to annual GDP growth. This is precisely what explains the competitive advantage enjoyed by certain Asian countries like Singapore, China, or Japan, which have dominated this ranking for two decades. Moreover, other studies have demonstrated that gaps in the education system directly translate into barriers to innovation, productivity, and, more broadly, economic growth.
This is why the reforms of the education system announced by the Head of State, Kaïs Saïed, are of crucial importance today, particularly for the country's economic future. For education is not only a matter of human development, it is a true driver of growth in economies where innovation, production, and competitiveness have become the main levers of prosperity.
