Tackling unemployment has been one of the goals of the 2011 revolution. Creating new paths of economic development is certainly one of the country’s biggest challenges, in order to mitigate chronic socio-economic challenges. Despite the return of economic growth, in 2018, the youth unemployment rate in Tunisia is still about 33, 5%. Many highly skilled young graduates are leaving the country due to better job opportunities abroad. About 262.000 jobs are needed to employ the country’s university graduates. The strong dependency on labor and foreign investments is, however, a challenge a lot of emerging and developing countries are facing.

Throughout the last decades, the specialization and centralization of mass production has created a strong dependency on labor and a rising individual alienation from value creating activities and the production of goods. This also results in a very limited participation of people in creating and shaping socio-economic and technological development processes. The conventional model of industrial production widens not only the gap between producers and consumers, but also between highly industrialized world regions (as producers) and less industrialized regions (as consumers and extended workbenches).

The unequal socio-spatial distribution of value added activities within global production networks examines that high value added activities such as machine design and manufacturing are limited to specific global places. As a result, a considerable amount of people are excluded from related knowledge and know-how.

The challenge is to tackle youth unemployment by empowering young Tunisians in making use of digital production technologies and profit from international knowledge networks, in order to create their own business models and become entrepreneurs on their own terms.