During this year, Tunisia is facing a challenging public debt repayment schedule. The profile of public debt service repayment is affected by the burden of loans contracted, especially in recent years. The country intends to settle the principal and interest on the external debt of several loans, amounting to 12.3 billion dinars.  

Two maturity dates significantly weight on   the debt repayment plan. To settle the t first one, due in February, the government resorted to requesting direct financing from the Tunisian Central Bank. The government requested exceptional direct funding worth 7 billion dinars ($2.25 billion) to fill a deficit in this year's budget, given the scarcity of external finance.2 The second settlement deadline is due in October 2024, coinciding with a crucial political event—the presidential elections. Tunisia is under the obligation to repay substantial credits, including four tranches of loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) totaling $360 million under the Rapid Financing Instrument, and ten tranches of credits amounting to $256 million under the Extended Facility Fund instrument.3 

The Tunisian government's financing needs will exceed 17% of GDP this year.  Debt service will count for two-thirds of this amount. The authorities' ability to cope with this situation remains very uncertain. In fact, 57% of the financing plan included in the budget is based on external resources, of which only one-third have been identified.4 The government is counting on official external financial support, but the repeated budgetary underperformances of recent years trigger lender’s caution. At the end of September 2023, the government had succeeded in mobilizing only 28% of the external resources planned in the initial budget.  

This situation is marked by a rejection of IMF diktats and a hostile stance towards the IFIs. In fact, official discourse and narrative acknowledge the negative impacts of IMF conditionalities. The presidential elections to be held in the autumn reduces the prospect of an agreement with the IMF, as an IMF program would necessitate the implementation of anti-social measures and reforms that violate rights, leading to increased poverty and social discord.5   

Despite an apparent a refusal of IMF conditionalities, the governments still adopt austerity measures, that appear clearly through the orientations of the 2024 Budget law or in the Medium-Term Budget Framework 2024-2026.6 

The government also continues borrowing form other donors of the Deauville Partnership, with no less dangerous conditions. Under the guise of the Energy transition7, Tunisia’s is contracting several loans from the World Bank and other development banks in support of the implementation of big projects, with potentially harmful impact to the country’s energy sovereignty and resources.8  

The government is also engaging in debt deals with political and social conditionalities; for instance the loans from the European Union in exchange of the government commitment to stop the flow of Tunisian as well as sub-Saharan migrants, involving the country in the European strategy of Border Externalization, and weaponizing the government means to against migrants at the expense human rights. 

Meanwhile, the government is failing to take any proactive step towards to strengthen its engagement in the African union discussions concerning the reform of the global financial architecture and advocating for the establishment of the African Union Financial Institutions (AUFI) and purse initiative like the alliance of the Africa Club. 9 

This borrowing approach is deepening the gap and distancing the country from its African and Pan-African identity, aligning it more closely with European interests. This policy direction towards the North may not only distance Tunisia from partners with whom Tunisia shares common interests but also weaken the country’s position in advocating for critical reforms of the GFA and undermine efforts in urging for debt cancellation. 

It's imperative to develop a holistic debt management system that centers the respect for and fulfillment of human rights, prioritizes partnerships with countries that share the same objectives, fostering solidarity and cooperation on a global scale and aligns with developmental goals while upholding sovereignty. 

All these elements highlight the polychotomy in the Tunisian strategy for mobilizing external financing resources. Coupled with this, there is a lack of transparency and clarity regarding the lending strategy. In fact, the Directorate General for Public Debt Management and Financial Cooperation has not published the monthly government debt brochure since December 202110. Additionally, the annexes to the Finance Act are typically not accessible to public until after the Finance Act has been ratified11.  

Moreover, the legal framework governing indebtedness is highly fragmented and provides weak accountability and control mechanism. 12 First, it marginalizes the role of parliamentarians in the validation of state policy commitments to donors, especially if these policies may threaten to erode rights, or may result in an unsustainability scenario. 

Tunisia is clearly lacking a comprehensive framework that delineates the objective conditions and criteria to guide government officials on what they should or should not accept during loan negotiations, and that parliamentarians can refer to monitor the government performance and exercise its role of oversight and control.  

This drives us to question, on a national level, the relevance to think the future of the Tunisian economy with the lens of these policies.   

For Tunisia, the reliance on external debt and especially multilateral lending drastically reduced the country’s leverage to negotiate the structural adjustment programs. It limited the ability of the Tunisian authorities to construct and defend endogenous policies that preserve economic and social rights, and to provide an answer to the political demands for dignity and social justice formulated by the masses of protesters in 2011.  

Feminist movements in Tunisia have had a central role in the political evolution of the country since the fight for the independence and have been at the heart of popular mobilizations since the 2010 /2011 revolution.  Women have protested by thousands to remind elected officials of their determination to enshrine equality and justice and to fight discrimination in the 2014 constitution.1 These women's mobilizations have revealed the vitality of the Tunisian feminist movement.  

While these efforts have primarily focused on civil and political rights, by ensuring a better representation of women in political spaces, addressing the multidimensional forms of violence experienced by women through the enactment of the organic law 58-2017 for the elimination of violence against women, and later thorough the sparking of conversations on equality and individual freedoms.  

Despite all the wins the post-revolution feminist movements went through,  claims for social and economic rights have remained somewhat limited, relegated to the background or timidly addressed. 

Economic violence was most of the time framed within the fight against inequalities and power relations between men and women, for instance with regards to the freedom of women to manage their financial resources, or through the conversation on inheritance rights and equal distribution of wealth. 

However, working on more structural violence, entrenched in macro-economic policies followed by the government since the structural adjustment plans and the assessment of their differential impact of women’s access to basic rights and services has not been addressed. 

 Women organization did take part in calls for reforming the current economic model, as well as a recurrent involvement in campaigns for more just economic models and against indebtedness, for instance during the campaign “Yezzi ma Rhantouna”. However, these actions did not yield their substantial involvement in conversations around the impacts of economic policy making, indebtedness or austerity on women’s rights. 

Although the feminist discourse on the intersection of debt, development and gender has been on the forefront of feminist organizations agenda across the Global South and is making its way since a few years in in the Arab world2, action and knowledge production as well as public conversations on these themes remain underexplored and marginally worked in Tunisia. 

Nowadays, we are currently facing the worst debt crisis in history. This crisis can be conceptualized as consequential to a global financial order shaped for the benefit of a colonial, patriarchal and Eurocentric system.  As denounced by Angela Davis, women, especially from the Global South have been the most marginalized from this system.  International Financial Institutions and debts conditionalities have had an increasing impact on women’s rights in the Global South whether through restrained access to public service, education, health care, social security or economic participation.  

The austerity measures imposed by the IMFs structural adjustment programs are impeding development priorities and it is particularly women and other marginalized and economically vulnerable communities that bear the highest price: the erosion of their economic and social rights. This  poverty-trap faced by many women in Tunisia is embedded in an international system where racialized women from the Global South are often the most marginalized within the patriarchal, colonial and racial economic and financial system.3 

At the same time, there is an absence of a national structured framework for managing sovereign debt. Who decides on conditionalities engagements? Who bears responsibility? And what mechanisms can allow communities accountability with regards to the financial and reforms commitments taken in their names? These questions are hardly asked in the public debate.  

In the context of accumulating debt, the impacts of IFIs driven reforms on rights and the difficulty of the government to mobilize the resources to finance rights, it’s becoming imperative to establish a progressive framework that enshrines accountability in decision making about debt. 

Recently, we are witnessing the emergence of new feminist movements adopting more intersectional approaches creating a diversity that is enriching discussions by offering varied perspectives. 

There is also a growing recognition of the impact of austerity measures on women and girls in Tunisia.4 

Intersectional feminist thinking opens tremendous possibilities to understand and reshape debt governance. Not only can it help us shape policies that defend women's rights, but it can also help us resist the deepening of financialization and its harmful effects on everyday life.  

Feminist economics, as a recent school of economic thought offer a new perspective, claiming that financial and economic policies can become tools to rebalance the state of inequality, and think economics and development protecting not only women’s rights but human rights, the intimate and the earth.5 

On the basis of the already documented impacts of conditioned debt on human rights and building on available knowledge on the differential impacts on women rights, there is a need in Tunisia, to explore how a feminist lens can inform the reflection of a more just debt management strategy for the country, which incorporates gender justice, equality and principles of the human rights-based economy.  

This meeting is set to open the conversation on feminist organizations participation in the national debate on the government's debt policies, and to reflect on the way the feminist lens can shape a debt management framework, which incorporates Human rights obligations, and triumphs a feminist vision of development. 

To do so, we will come together to analyze the current positions and ongoing state of action of feminist actors regarding public debt and its gendered impacts on human rights, capitalize on past experiences of research and advocacy to explore together paths forwards to re-affirm feminist participation in Tunisia’s debt management which is urgently needs to be gender sensitive.