While Tunisian companies scan Europe with the steadiness of a magnetized needle, a $2.28 billion resource lies asleep a few hundred kilometers to the south, largely ignored.
This figure is not an approximate estimate gleaned from an institutional report. It comes from a recent research study published in 2025 as part of the Qawafel project funded by the French Development Agency and implemented by Expertise France, with the support of the WTO Chair in Tunis.
It mobilizes a decision-support tool, the TRADE DSM model, designed in South Africa and already tested in several African economies, to map with unusual precision what Tunisia could sell, where, and to whom.
An inherited dependence, a reflex to correct
Tunisia’s recent commercial history has largely been written facing the Mediterranean. The association agreement signed with the European Union in 1995, designed to lead to a Euro-Mediterranean free-trade area, has durably oriented export flows northward: machinery, textiles, electronic products found Europe their natural outlet.
The African continent, for its part, has never occupied more than a marginal place, receiving only about 10% of the country’s total exports, with Algeria and Libya concentrating the bulk of this proximity trade.
This imbalance is no longer tenable. Since 2010, regional political instability and successive shocks have widened Tunisia’s trade deficit and weakened an economy overly dependent on a single outlet. In the face of this structural vulnerability, Tunis has begun to realign its strategic compass: observer status with ECOWAS obtained in 2017, ratification of the COMESA agreement in 2019, accession to the African Continental Free Trade Area in 2020. The institutional framework exists. What was missing was a fine mapping of real opportunities.
What the screening of the African market reveals
