Tunisian expert blames educational system

Tunisian political activist and specialist in economic transactions Mohamed Saleh al-Janadi, stressed that the most important obstacle to Tunisia today in the economic field is the inability of the system of education and training to meet the need of economic institutions of the labor force competent in modern economic requirements.

He added, in an interview with “Arabs Today”, the education system, which was implemented by the former regime of President Zein Al Abedeen Ben Ali, led to the dumping of the labor market by hundreds of thousands of high-ranking graduates and graduates of training centers without being able to get a job to benefit the state, economic institutions or the Tunisian economy in general.

He continued that this shortage led to the weakness of Tunisian institutions and inability to achieve the country's sufficiency from the manufactured materials, including equipment and various consumables, which made the state has to get them from abroad in return for hard currency.

This shortage, according to al-Janadi, exacerbated Tunisia's trade deficit due to the high value of imports compared to exports. He blamed this problem for the current deterioration of the value of Tunisian dinar. He called the government for taking serious steps to establish new specialized educational institutions to qualify the fresh graduates to meet the needs of modern sectors.

Mohammed Saleh Al-Janadi said that the youth turning towards these sectors will reduce the number of graduates in other traditional disciplines that are no longer required or are only producing unemployment.

He added that this should be accompanied by incentives and encouragement for graduates of the said competencies either to send their own small institutions or to operate them in large institutions, thus creating a new industrial fabric in the country and new local products that achieve their self-sufficiency and enrich them from abroad, and light industries in the field of clothing, footwear and modern technologies, and thus can stop the bleeding of hard currency, which is wasted by the country every day to supply such goods from abroad, one of the solutions capable of restoring the value of the dinar.

He stressed that the state can now begin to prepare for this new alignment by introducing the maximum possible new educational and training competencies at the first stage in the existing training centers today.