Tunisia's most reliable development partner lives abroad
Tunisians working abroad send home close to 3 billion dollars every year. That single flow exceeds foreign direct investment, exceeds most years of tourism receipts, and dwarfs the grant aid Tunisia receives from all Western donors combined. It arrives without conditionality, without procurement rules, without a single policy matrix attached, and it goes directly to households in Kasserine and Jendouba that no donor programme has ever reached efficiently.
The strange thing is how little Tunisian policy is built around this fact.
The numbers nobody centres
Roughly 1.5 million Tunisians live abroad, most of them in France, Italy and Germany, a diaspora equal to more than a tenth of the resident population. Their transfers amount to around 5 to 6 percent of GDP in a typical year, and the true figure is higher once informal channels and goods carried home in August suitcases are counted.
Compare the aid column. European grants to Tunisia, stripped of loans that must be repaid, come to a few hundred million euros a year in a good year. The diaspora outperforms the entire donor community annually, in cash, quietly, and has done so for decades. During the pandemic, when tourism collapsed and investors fled, remittances rose. They are the most countercyclical, most crisis proof source of foreign currency the country has.
Yet the national conversation treats emigrants mainly as a loss, a brain drain to be lamented, while treating donors as the partners to be courted. The lament is understandable. The doctors and engineers leaving through the airports are a genuine haemorrhage. But the policy conclusion is backwards. The diaspora already behaves like a development agency. The task is to give it the instruments of one.
What a diaspora strategy would look like
Start with banking. Sending money to Tunisia remains expensive and clumsy, with transfer costs eating several percentage points of every wire. Modern payment corridors, negotiated at state level with France and Italy the way Gulf states negotiated them with South Asia, would put tens of millions of euros a year back into Tunisian households at zero fiscal cost.
Second, investment channels. Remittances today fund consumption and property because those are the only accessible vehicles. Diaspora bonds, tax treated investment accounts, and matched funding for businesses in the interior would convert a fraction of that 3 billion into productive capital. Morocco has run versions of this playbook for years through its diaspora institutions and its banks' European networks. Tunisia has studies.
Third, mobility itself. Every negotiation with Europe should treat legal labour pathways as an economic policy, since each additional worker abroad is a future remittance stream, a skills pipeline and a commercial bridge. Circular migration schemes, recognition of Tunisian qualifications, and portability of pensions matter more to the national balance sheet than most items on the trade agenda.
The political blockage
None of this is technically difficult, which raises the question of why so little of it exists. Part of the answer is institutional: diaspora affairs sit in a weak corner of government, shuffled between ministries, with consulates run as document mills rather than economic outposts. Part of it is political: a diaspora with financial weight eventually wants a voice, and voices abroad are harder to manage than donors, who at least negotiate quietly.
The result is a relationship run on sentiment, activated each summer when the ferries dock in La Goulette and forgotten by September. Meanwhile the money keeps arriving, unthanked and unleveraged, doing more for Tunisian families than any memorandum signed in Brussels or any mission flown in from Washington.
A country in Tunisia's fiscal position cannot afford to leave its largest financial inflow unmanaged. The partners Tunisia keeps courting issue press releases. The partner it keeps ignoring issues wire transfers. Policy should follow the money.