Tunisia Sets Out a Plan to Become a Regional Online Commerce Hub by 2031
The trade ministry has opened consultations on a five year strategy meant to turn Tunisia into a regional centre for digital trade. The ambition is large. The legal and financial plumbing behind it is not yet in place.
Tunisia has put a number and a date on its digital trade ambitions. Opening national consultations on 2 June, the minister of trade and export development, Samir Abid, said the country aims to become a leading regional platform for online commerce, digital innovation and high value digital services by 2031. The consultations run through the end of this week and will feed into a National Online Commerce Strategy for the years 2027 to 2031, due to be finalised by February 2027 as a five year roadmap.
The framing is deliberately broad. The minister cast the strategy as more than a sectoral plan, presenting it as part of a wider bid to build a modern economy in which digital technology drives growth and competitiveness, and in which more small and medium Tunisian firms can reach markets directly rather than through intermediaries. The work builds on an online commerce readiness assessment carried out in 2022, and it is being shaped under the supervision of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which is supporting the steering committee, the national working groups and the reforms that go with them.
The diagnosis behind the plan is candid about what holds the sector back, and the honesty is the most useful part of it. Tunisia's main law governing sales methods and commercial advertising dates from 2000, written before the business models it now has to regulate existed. Officials acknowledge that the legal framework is largely in place but that the real problem is enforcement, especially against foreign platforms operating from outside the country and beyond easy reach of Tunisian regulators. Updating the rules means grappling with electronic payment and electronic signature, a complex and interdependent system, and with the standards set by the African Continental Free Trade Area's digital trade protocol, which Tunisia has signed onto. The director of online commerce development at the ministry, Khabab El Hadhri, has pointed to projects already under way to regulate fast parcel delivery and to create a national platform that would let companies trade online within a more orderly framework.
What the strategy says less about is the financial machinery that decides whether any of this works. Tunisia remains a heavily cash based economy with low card penetration, and its restrictive foreign exchange regime makes it awkward to send and receive money across borders. The same rules that the country's business lobby is currently pressing parliament to loosen are the rules that make it hard for a Tunisian freelancer, developer or small online seller to collect payment from a client abroad and bring it into the formal economy. A national platform and a parcel delivery code matter little if the payment rails underneath them stay closed. Digital trade is, in the end, a question of moving money, and Tunisia has spent decades making money hard to move.
The country does have real assets to build on. It sits at a short distance from Europe, it has a young and comparatively well trained technical workforce, and it has trade ties across Africa that the continental free trade area is meant to deepen. Those advantages are exactly why the gap between ambition and execution stings. A skilled, connected population already trades online, much of it informally, offshore or in cash, precisely because the formal channels are slow and the rules are old.
That is the test the strategy will face. A roadmap to 2031 is a statement of intent, and a sober one. Whether Tunisia becomes a regional hub or simply produces another well written plan will depend on the parts that sit outside the trade ministry's own pen: the currency rules, the payment systems and the willingness to enforce against the foreign platforms that already dominate the market.
