Today will be held the international conference Tunisia 2020 in support of Tunisia’s economic, social and sustainable development. The investment will brings together international political decision-makers, investors and Tunisia’s economic partners on 29 and 30 November 2016 in Tunis. This article originally published on October 23rd and analyzing 58 projects, have been updated today to include to whole list of 141 projects in the French section of the conference’s website.
To get a better overview of the 141 projects that are actually listed on the official conference website, I have shared an open version of the projects lists that you can download in CSV format, notice that encoding is UTF-8 :
CSV Projects’s data 5-12-2016 (FR, EN and AR)
Analyzing Tunisia 2020 projects
Now by analyzing data we can see that most of the projects are in the public sector with 46%, with a very noticeable increase in the private sector and PPP which represent respectively 30% and 24%. We’ll have a look with more details on the private and public sectors projects.
However if 24% of the projects are in the PPP sector, we should ask the question does do Tunisia have at least one successful case study of PPP projects ? Whether it was with the new or old legislation… ?
If we count the number of project by sector we will notice that most of the projects are in the Transportation which represent about 16% with 23 projects and total investment of 4599M€, so there is only one project which have been added since October 23rd. Followed by Agriculture with 19 projects and only 677M€ and we notice that these projects have been recently added. Energy and Environment with respectively 17 and 10 projects each one, but valued at 4576M€ and 544M€. Which is quiet strange as previously there was 5 projects only in environment with 596M€ !
However the second highest investment value is not in the Environment or the agriculture as the highest valuable projects are in the Energy with 4576M€, followed by the TIC activity area with 3314M€ and only five projects.
Now if we look by tendering Authority we’ll notice that most authorities have one project only which is good, more than one project could be justified… However seeing entities having more than 8 projects that’s too much in my humble opinion.
The 4 authorities that have 40% of the projects are :
- Ministère de l’Equipement, de l’Habitat et de l’Aménagement du Territoire (13 projects 3457M€)
- Société Tunisienne d’Electricité et du Gaz (9 projects 2360M€)
- Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Tunisiens (8 projects 703M€)
- Ministère de santé (6 projects 616M€)
Impact of Tunisia 2020
What are the impact of these projects ? I’m not going in details to analyse impact, however if we have a look on the word cloud of text impact we’ll notice that : Improvement and Enhancement are the most redundant words. Only “Transport” appeared in the top ten keywords which is obvious since 38% of the projects are in the Transportation.
keyword (weight)
Amélioration (41)
Renforcement (39)
Développement (18)
Réduction (16)
Gouvernorats (14)
L’attractivité (13)
Transport (13)
Appui (13)
Développement (12)
Connectivité (12)
Financial Arrangement
In term of financial arrangement all the projects will be financed by public funds, however the English translation is not really accurate since in the French section it’s mentioned that “The project will be implemented by the state on foreign credit”. So overall it’s all credits, and there are already many candidates :
Institution (Project)
World Bank (2)
AFD (2)
EU (2+1 donation)
BEI (3)
KFW (2)
FKD (1)
ADB (1)
Overall 11 projects have already found investors for its totality or part of it. Four projects will be financed by private operators, 8 in PPP, while the rest 60% are still looking for investors. Which looks great so far !
Few issues to clarify
Unfortunately I didn’t had the time to go through all the projects one by one, however it happens that one of the projects that is actually listed on the website is a work in progress. The project titled “Stratégie de développement de l’administration électronique” which is actually on going, the second group of companies in this page won the tender and it’s financed by the ADB. Also it happens that I participated in this tender with the fifth group of companies and it’s strange to see it listed again with 24 M€, while the current project is a donation from the ADB of about $700k.
Feel free to download the CSV of the projects and share your findings :
CSV Projects’s data 5-12-2016 (FR, EN and AR)
Old CSVs are also available on request.