Between unattainable guarantees, banking mistrust, and entrepreneurial ingenuity, a qualitative study conducted with five Tunisian executives reveals the hidden logics that determine the survival of small and medium-sized enterprises.
In Tunisia, the survival of a small or medium-sized enterprise is not only about its market, its product, or the quality of its team. It hinges, well before that, on its ability to obtain money at the right moment. This obvious truth, known to all field practitioners, remains surprisingly under-documented in its most concrete dimension, namely the strategies actually deployed by leaders to circumvent, tame, or charm a financial system that often keeps them at a distance.
SMEs account for more than 90% of the Tunisian entrepreneurial fabric and bear a decisive share of national employment. They are, in institutional discourse, celebrated as the engine of innovation and job creation. In the day-to-day practice of entrepreneurs, they are above all the arena of a constant struggle to transform a viable idea into available cash.
It is this struggle, in its finest mechanisms, that a multi-case qualitative study published in 2025 chose to explore. Grounded in the Resource-Based View, the research relies on semi-structured interviews conducted with five Tunisian SME leaders active in textiles, IT services, agro-food, interior design, and logistics, each having maintained their activity and secured financing for a period of at least two years.
The paradox of an economy
Tunisia’s macroeconomic figures illustrate a two-speed system. In 2023, 54.4% of the country’s SMEs reported having created around 27,000 net jobs, a positive signal. But the pace of recruitment slowed compared with 2022, reaching its lowest level since the pre-COVID-19 period, according to the National Institute of Statistics.
Behind this relative improvement lies a harsher reality. Only 32% of Tunisian SMEs cross the two-year threshold, and some earlier studies report failure rates as high as 75%. Among mid-sized SME leaders interviewed in earlier studies, 66% point to the lack of financial resources as the main reason for the cessation of their activity.
