Tunisia at its crossroad: The role of a local development contextualised entrepreneurship training at universities

Introduction

As Tunisia moves away from its former regime, the country faces the historic opportunity to pursue an innovating socio-economic development to overcome its challenges. Of course, before the so-called Jasmine Revolution in 2011, Tunisia was neither an economic ‘tiger’ nor a sustainable economy. However, it has achieved an average economic growth rate of nearly 5% since 2000. But there were and are major disparities in life conditions, especially economic inequality between the country’s regions, behind this generally positive picture. These disparities have played a key role in fuelling social unrest. It was at one of the hardest-hit towns of the areas of Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and Thala, all in the country’s centre-west, where the rebellion against the former regime emerged.

After four years, Tunisia is in the course of an interesting transition to set the country on the path of a democratically driven transformation. The challenges of this transition are in general major problems of unemployment or precariously employed facing a relatively young population with a relatively high proportion of graduates. There are some 200,000 unemployed graduates in Tunisia today and a supply of 80,000 new graduates every year who need employment. Another challenge concerns the limited capacity of Tunisia’s business sector to innovate its products, its marketing or processing and management. This sector is dominated by traditional firms in traditional sectors with poor growth and income generation opportunities and must open up to new methods, products and markets. Creating jobs for youth and transforming the business sector are two aspects of the same challenge, a challenge that only entrepreneurship can address.

As in many countries, entrepreneurship has also found its way into higher education in Tunisia. It is often said here as elsewhere that the universities have a crucial role as potential drivers for a locally inspired and contextualised promotion of entrepreneurship. However, Tunisia’s universities and vocational training centres lack the efficient promotion of entrepreneurial potentials and the capacity to connect to their surrounding localities and capitalise on their regional assets. Following the current debates in the scientific community and among political deciders, Tunisia is precisely missing an entrepreneurial driven economy which recognises its regional and local specificities. Alongside the highly concentrated economic activities on its coastal strip, the inner regions of Tunisia invariably suffer from the mentioned high unemployment. In these regions, there is an absence of economically self-supporting activities. They just serve the economic hot spots at the coastal strip mostly as a reservoir for natural resources and relatively ‘cheap’ labour. The government has introduced a series of universities and vocational training centres in these remote areas. They are often the only important public investments, but so far they are neither considered fit nor capable of playing the role of a regional driver for the entrepreneurial development of their areas.

This short review examines current strategies, structures and practices for entrepreneurship promotion in Tunisian universities highlighting activities to instil entrepreneurial intentions and to favour business creation among graduates. One of the core strengths of the Tunisian system is that it reaches a large proportion of students with basic entrepreneurship teaching. The article sets out the opportunities to improve this teaching using international best practice models and to complement it with more intense start-up support for those students ready to go further.

The challenge: A country moving at two different speeds and the evidence of the need for local development

While Tunisia over the past four years has kept peace within its society more effectively than Egypt, for example, its transition is still threatened by a weak economy and regional disparities. The unemployment rate remains persistently high: the IMF reported a 16.7% unemployment rate in 2013, and estimates of youth unemployment exceed 30%. At the same time, foreign investment slowed from $1.52 billion in 2010 to $1.06 billion in 2013 (IBRD, 2014). In general, the loss of job creation and inflation, especially lived as rising food prices, are exerting pressure on Tunisians nowadays.

This statistical information fails to show the regional inequality between Tunisia’s coastal areas and its interior. For example, in 2010 the Centre-West Region, which is by far the poorest region in Tunisia, was home to 41.3% of the poorest Tunisians, while none of the coastal provinces’ relative contributions exceeds 10% (NIS, 2012). The high unemployment has also led to the rapid growth of the informal sector: it is estimated that informal economic activities account for as much as 30% of national GDP (NIS, 2012). The gap in poverty rates between the capital region Tunis and the rest of the country shows that the regional variation in terms of living standards increased between 2000 and 2004 (IBRD, 2014). This becomes even more evident when comparing the coastal regions and the interior parts of the country. For example, in the Centre-West, the poverty rate was 14 times higher than in Tunis in 2004, compared with 8.5 times higher in 2000. The three most privileged regions, meaning Greater Tunis, the Centre and the North-East, are home to 60% of the population and almost 90% of formal enterprises (ADB, 2011: 4). The three deprived western regions, the North-West, Centre-West and South-West, accommodate 30% of the Tunisian population, but less than 8% of enterprises (ADB, 2011: 4).

While disparities among social strata and regions increased from 1995 onwards, during the last decade the Tunisian universities and universities of applied sciences have been developing their own internal activities for entrepreneurship education and start-up support. It was the former regime under Ben Ali that recognised the growing pressure resulting from an increasing number of graduates and the stagnant number of available jobs. The promotion of business creation through entrepreneurship teaching was considered a necessary instrument to get young graduates (self) employed. At that time, the government obliged rather than encouraged the universities to establish dedicated infrastructure in the form of centres or contact persons that provide teaching activities as well as advice and counselling. Although this was for many universities rather a top-down obligation than a self-determined decision based on conviction, years later all universities in Tunisia are offering a teaching module in entrepreneurial culture. Most of the universities provide entrepreneurship education across a wide range of faculties, also as part of the mandatory study programme. However, not all the universities include their engineering faculties in their entrepreneurship education offer, although this discipline tends to be one of the main sources of high-impact entrepreneurship internationally. Furthermore, the entrepreneurship courses provided are mostly for students from within individual faculties, primarily the ones taking economics.

Today, the graduate business start-up support arrangements within the universities or at the public promotion agencies are strongly focused on the early stages of business launch, neglecting later support to overcome critical thresholds during business development and growth that contribute to ensuring longer term survival and business development. Also the relation between these support services and the local economic context together with its business communities is not well established. For example, the occupancy rates of business incubators are often rather low. Despite some exceptions, the regional economic specificities have in large parts been neglected.

The momentum for the future: Entrepreneurial universities as drivers towards learning regions

The universities and vocational training centres which the government has introduced in Tunisia’s regions are often the only important (public) investments. Given this unexploited potential and the current challenges the country faces, there is an opportunity and obligation for the higher education institutions to assume the role of regional driver for the entrepreneurial development of their areas. It is a big shift from universities long recognised as providers of basic scientific knowledge for industrial innovation through their research towards universities’ role in economic production, bringing universities indigenised and integrated into the economic cycle of innovation and growth of their surrounding regions. But this transformation of universities is feasible and worthwhile, as the example of the Tunisian University of Sfax has illustrated.

The example from Sfax, Tunisia’s seconded largest city, shows how in addition to well-known tasks of a university, the knowledge capitalisation, boundary-spanning mechanisms, related to the opportunities and threats of the region, are created by the university. These mechanisms make the university engage with regional needs and development through the creation of a scientific association. The ‘Association l’Université et l’Environement – AUNE’ was created in 2000. It functions as the link between the university and its social–economic environment. Its adherents consist of academics and business people. The Association organise and participate in joint activities and projects and build relationships with the components of the local economic environment. Another mechanism is the organisation of an annual Sfax University fair, the Univ’expo, an event which is open to all Tunisian academic institutions, research centres, laboratories and the national and international academic and industrial partners of Sfax University. The promising experiences of Sfax show how the transfer of academic knowledge to the productive sectors can be facilitated by an entrepreneurial university; demonstrating how the mobility of researchers between research centres and production firms setting-up within Sfax techno park can be facilitated as long as the university together with business support agents acts as platform for providing the counselling, support and initial accommodation to young researchers.

The lesson is that Tunisian higher education institutions can play an essential role in creating jobs for graduates and building a dynamic base of growth-oriented businesses if they recognise entrepreneurship promotion as a strategic objective and develop appropriate activities in close relation with their local economic context. The second lesson is the cooperation with professional business support (public or private) agents required for the often inadequate provision of financial, technical and infrastructure resources to start a business. Today, in Tunisia only three of the universities provide such resources directly to graduate starters, mostly provided in business incubators but without sufficient additional financial support. Thus, partnering with public and private business and start-up supporters is crucial.

In these times of transition, it is also necessary to remember that political changes have also taken place within the Tunisian universities and with respect to their governance. Practically all university presidents, deans of faculty and directors of learning institutions and schools were replaced after the elections during the summer of 2011, and there are now again new elections in summer 2014. For example, the Sfax University faces some uncertainties whether the prominent role for entrepreneurial support will remain a priority. The fact that even in the case of Sfax the continuation of an engaged entrepreneurial support is uncertain illustrates an overall weakness when it comes to entrepreneurship and universities in Tunisia. There is a widespread lack of tradition in working and collaborating with businesses and limited cooperation between universities and other socio-economic actors. The object of entrepreneurship education is poorly defined. The various actors adopt different concepts, which vary according to the state of their knowledge and the level of their experience. There is a lack of inter-disciplinarity.

Entrepreneurship is a discipline enriched by the input of different disciplines such as management sciences, economics, humanities and social sciences. The business ideas or business plan competitions, which become more popular among Tunisian universities, might be such an instrument where different disciplines could meet. In the same way, research projects and programmes centred on entrepreneurship education might attract researchers from different disciplines interested in the same subjects or in certain research problems. So far the Tunisian universities lack a research-oriented approach to the topic of entrepreneurship. Such an approach could contribute to overcoming the lack of clear definition of the educational object between one person and the other; each one is teaching entrepreneurship in his or her own way. The subject matter is taught in different management courses; entrepreneurship education is mixed up with courses such as business economics, project management or project assessment. There is also often confusion between entrepreneurship and enterprise (company) and between entrepreneurship culture and business knowledge and the dimension of the local economic contexts is mostly forgotten.

Conclusions

The current challenges in Tunisia demand a type of university that serves as a driver for the entrepreneurial development of its local surrounding. This requires that the universities themselves become entrepreneurial. After independence of Tunisia from French colonialism in the 1960s of the last century, higher education endured several major structural reforms. The first one marked the birth of the Tunisian modern education system. Its principles allowed the country to make considerable progresses in economic and social development. Thirty years later, in the 1980s, confronted with new problems, the Tunisian higher education was restructured through a second reform. This update brought new visions and paradigms by opening the system on the international standards and the accreditation processes. Now, after the country has entered into a political transformation facing challenging economic problems, a new reform seems to be on the agenda. The gathered experiences to date on entrepreneurship teaching and support together with the currently burning debate on how to overcome the regional disparities might unfold the essence of the forthcoming reform: the promotion of entrepreneurial universities promoting the local development of their surrounding regions.