Social Protection Panorama in Tunisia

During the first two days of the workshop, Tunisia presented its social protection system, adhering to the principles outlined in the ILO Convention 102 on minimum standards in social protection. It is a comprehensive system that covers health insurance, family benefits, and accidents at work. It has two pillars: social insurance (social security) and social assistance. The system consists of both contributory and non-contributory components, with coverage extending to 65 per cent of the population under the contributory social security system and 25 per cent under the non-contributory system.Tunisia regards its social protection system as a fundamental tool in combating poverty, instability, and inequalities at work. 

In 2019, Tunisia revised its social protection programmes to better reach the most vulnerable and address social issues within low-income populations. The national project focuses on improving social protection access and care for fishers to reduce informality. This underscores a key challenge encountered by these initiatives: formalizing a population primarily composed of self-employed individuals. Another challenge in this context is the identification of the potential beneficiaries, which is facilitated by active social work. This makes it possible to identify populations beyond individuals and to include households. 

Regarding contributions, there is a low density of contributions, as most fishers prefer to keep their income for living expenses rather than contribute to social security programmes. Given the seasonal nature of small-scale fishing activity, encouraging and increasing social contributions from artisanal fishers constitutes another challenge. Article 9 of law of 1970 sets that fisher's mutual societies, which are collective enterprises providing complementary social security schemes and other services of social nature, can play a key role in collecting them. However, the mechanism as to how to do so is still unclear.  

Tunisia is aiming for universal social protection, based on a solid registration system, and stresses the necessity for the social organization to establish a clear database. Finally, the presentation underlined the importance of designing a social protection system tailored to the artisanal sector, considering the seasonal nature of the profession, low income, and large household sizes.  Efforts are also being made to increase the resilience of fishers to covariant shocks and various hazards of climate change.