CAP Emploi in Tunisia: Skills, entrepreneurship and formalisation serving young people and businesses

With support from the African Development Bank, the CAP Emploi Programme is helping Tunisia address a central challenge: turning skills, entrepreneurial ideas, and informal activities into sustainable economic opportunities. In this interview, the programme coordinator discusses its financing structure, early results, and the prospects it opens up for young people, women, and project promoters, while also addressing the challenges that will shape its next phase.

1. What makes the CAP Emploi Programme distinctive, and how is it financed?
 

The CAP Emploi Programme is part of the Tunisian Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training’s 2024–2027 sector plan. Its distinctive feature is that it more closely links training, labour market integration, entrepreneurship, and the formalisation of economic activity to accelerate job creation in Tunisia in the short and medium term.

From a financing perspective, the programme is based on a partnership with the African Development Bank through a €90 million loan signed on 10 September 2024, complemented by a $2.5 million grant from the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) initiative. It is a performance-based programme: disbursements are linked to the achievement of specific annual indicators, following a results-based financing approach. This approach encourages a culture of monitoring, evaluation, and accountability, while creating positive momentum among the teams responsible for implementation.

2. What are the programme’s main areas of intervention, and who are its target groups?
 

The programme is structured around three complementary components. The first, dedicated to skills development, aims to improve the employability of jobseekers, through targeted training and reskilling pathways aligned with the real needs of businesses. The second component focuses on entrepreneurship and formalisation: end-to-end support for project promoters, access to zero-interest loans to cover self-financing requirements, and the rollout of self-employed status. The third — institutional support — aims to strengthen the capacity of implementing entities, modernise monitoring and evaluation, and adapt training programmes to sectors of the future.

The CAP Emploi Programme targets jobseekers, project promoters, entrepreneurs seeking to expand their activities, business leaders looking for skills, and informal-sector workers. This integrated approach makes it possible to act simultaneously on the supply of skills, business creation, and the formalisation of the economy.

3. What is your assessment of the results achieved by the end of 2025?
 

The results recorded as at the end of December 2025 are very encouraging. They show that the programme is responding to real demand on the ground and is already beginning to deliver measurable results in employability, entrepreneurship, and formalisation.

On training and employability, 4,593 beneficiaries received complementary training in 2025, compared with an initial target of 4,000. Women accounted for 77% of beneficiaries. The number of partner businesses increased from 68 in 2024 to 480 in 2025.

On entrepreneurship support, employment, and self-employment offices, together with ANETI’s “Entrepreneurship spaces” — the National Agency for Employment and Self-Employment — supported 11,116 project promoters in 2025, compared with a target of 4,500. Women represented 73% of those supported.

On project financing, following the agreement signed in May 2025 with the Tunisian Solidarity Bank, 3,136 projects were financed for a total amount of 102.06 million Tunisian dinars, 47.5% of which benefited women.

On formalisation, the national self-employed platform, launched in 2024, had issued 6,558 cards by the end of 2025, exceeding the annual target of 5,000 integrations.

These results illustrate one of the programme’s major contributions: turning financial and technical support into concrete pathways towards employment, formal activity, and economic autonomy.

4. What are the programme’s priorities for the next stages, and what challenges remain?
 

Looking ahead, our ambition is to build on the excellent results of the first phases to sustain the programme’s impact.

Our priorities for the next stages are structured around the following areas:

First, bringing support and financing services closer to young people across Tunisia, drawing on the strength of our regional network — ANETI’s Employment and Self-Employment Offices (BETI) and “Entrepreneurship spaces” (EE), as well as branches of the Tunisian Solidarity Bank. We want to ensure that every governorate benefits from a strong entrepreneurial dynamic tailored to its local specificities. This requires the continuous upskilling of our field teams, which is essential to guarantee the quality and sustainability of the services offered, well beyond the programme’s closing date.

Second, women’s inclusion has been a cross-cutting success of the programme, as shown by their strong representation in the support programmes offered by ANETI. Our future priority is to maintain this momentum by further facilitating women’s access to credit and removing socio-cultural or economic barriers.

Third, the rollout of self-employed status remains a priority workstream. Beyond the issuance of cards, the real challenge lies in sustaining these activities. The aim is to turn formal integration into real opportunities for growth by connecting self-employed workers to broader markets, subcontracting networks, and sustainable social protection mechanisms.

The main challenge undeniably lies in keeping processing times under control in the face of a massive influx of applications, which requires constant vigilance and strong managerial agility from our technical committees.

Finally, the lessons learned from the first year of CAP Emploi require us to continuously improve our monitoring and evaluation system to ensure that every dinar invested translates into the creation of decent, stable, and high-value-added jobs for our economy.