Editorial

The Jasmine Revolution keeps the Tunisian on tenterhooks. It is also an important topic for many foreigners in German VET Centres: Funded by the German Foreign Office They endeavour to achieve a closer business and employment-effective vocational education and training system in the North African country.

Our Tunisian colleagues and the German partners are not a little proud of what has been achieved. Since the end of 2011 we started seven new projects from scratch ahead with revolutionary speed and a lot of pragmatism.

That worked because our projects are highly decentralised. It was right, too, to give the many participants a common identity with the Employment Pact Tunisia. That is important because German VET structures are quite not easy to understand abroad. It was also right to involve practitioners because this created a we “the trainers-feeling”.

The Tunisian decision-makers are obviously committed to our approach of the “institutionalised cooperation of the private sector”. Therefore our Tunisian friends have succeeded to contribute substantial own funds to the realisation of the project despite a difficult post-revolutionary environment. This is extremly admirable – and, for us, an obligation for a continued closer cooperation. Two years are not enough to establish for sustainable structural changes.

Gebhard Weiss, Managing Director