There exists in Tunisia a wealth deposit that no one measures, that no one steers, and that the country nevertheless lets exhaust year after year.
This deposit is not located underground or in the Treasury accounts. It lies in classrooms, in the ability of a teenager to reason, to model, to solve an abstract problem. This deposit carries a technical name: scientific capital. And its silent erosion could well constitute the most costly blind spot of Tunisia’s economic policy.
This analysis relies on the work of the Arab Institute of Business Leaders (IACE), whose study “Mathematics at the Heart of Tunisia’s Development: Diagnosis, Challenges, and Reform Strategy” provides a diagnosis as rigorous as it is alarming about the trajectory of fundamental scientific skills in the country.
A national asset without a balance sheet
Every modern economy manages its major balances with precise indicators. Growth is measured. Inflation is monitored. Employment is broken down quarterly. But scientific capital, this invisible raw material fueling engineering, artificial intelligence, advanced industry, and research, still largely escapes the radar of public decision-makers.
Tunisia has no durable national mechanism to monitor the evolution of fundamental learning, and its absence from recent major international assessments deprives it of any external point of comparison.
The result of this blind spot is visible in a single dizzying figure. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index assigns Tunisia a score of 0.52. In other words, a child born today would reach adulthood with about half the productive potential they could have developed in an optimal educational system. The length of schooling does not explain this result; it remains relatively high. It is the quality of learning that is lacking.
The paradox of a country that graduates without integrating
For decades, the state has invested heavily in education and higher education, producing an increasing number of graduates. But this quantitative accumulation masks a structural fracture.
The unemployment rate among higher-education graduates rose from 3.8% in 1994 to 24.9% in the third quarter of 2025, while national unemployment, by contrast, hovers in a much more stable range, between 14.1% and 16.4%. The gap has widened for thirty years without ever closing.
This paradox shifts the real question. Tunisia’s challenge is no longer how many people the system trains, but what these people are actually capable of producing, innovating, and adapting in an economy that is constantly changing.
Mathematics occupy here a singular place. They are not the domain of an isolated school discipline; they constitute the common language of engineering, finance, data analysis, and research. A country can import machines and temporarily attract foreign experts. It cannot import sustainably its ability to train its own talents.
An economic bill long hidden
How much does this erosion really cost? IACE puts forward a figure worth pondering by any economic decision-maker: about 9.7 billion dinars per year of potentially unproduced added value, or nearly 6% of the national GDP.
This amount does not represent a visible accounting loss in official statistics, but a real foregone revenue, made up of innovations that never arise, career paths that plateau below their potential, and skills that the economy must import because it cannot produce them itself. The study even notes that this estimate remains prudent, as it does not include tax losses related to degraded professional insertion, nor the emigration of locally trained talents.
This bill does not stop at the boundaries of the public budget. It enters directly into the wallets of families. In 2021, Tunisian households spent an average of 33.2 dinars per person on private mathematics lessons, a phenomenon that would today amount to roughly 500 million dinars nationwide. The public education system thus delegates part of its mission to the most solvent families, widening inequalities among students according to their social environment.
Meanwhile, the state’s budgetary effort remains substantial. By 2026, the budget allocated to education and higher education reaches 11 billion dinars, nearly double the state’s total investment budget. The question is no longer the level of public spending; it is its return on investment.
The long view versus institutional time
Why does a project so profitable in theory remain so little undertaken in practice? The answer lies in a structural asymmetry. The costs of an educational reform are immediate and institutionally sensitive: revising teacher training, reorganizing curricula, redeploying budget priorities.
Its benefits, by contrast, appear only after a decade, well beyond the budget cycles that structure public decision-making.
This dissonance between institutional time and economic time explains largely why investment in human capital remains chronically under-prioritized.
Add to that a remarkable dispersion. The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Higher Education, universities, and economic actors: each institution pilots a fragment of the system without possessing a view of the national trajectory.
Levers to break out of the blind spot
IACE outlines three directions to transform this diagnosis into action. The first is to establish a national system for measuring scientific skills, capable of tracking fundamental learning and territorial gaps over time. The second calls for defining a national trajectory for developing scientific capital, driven by a vision that goes beyond changes in government.
The third proposes creating a dedicated inter-ministerial governance, potentially embodied by an independent national observatory tasked with documenting trends and clarifying public decisions.
The underlying message goes beyond schooling alone. Scientific capital must be recognized as an intangible infrastructure of national competitiveness, on par with roads, energy, or digital infrastructure. What cannot be measured cannot be managed. And what cannot be managed continues to erode, quietly, at the expense of the country’s future growth.
