Enhancing Tunisian youth employability through internships in Belgian companies

The project, funded by the Belgian Government, was implemented from March 2018 to December 2019. In the first phase of the project, outreach towards the private sector in Belgium and Tunisia was conducted, and contact was established with stakeholders in both countries. As a result of the outreach, companies interested in hosting and training young Tunisian graduates in Belgium were identified along with an initial set of companies interested in hiring them upon return to Tunisia. Contacting additional companies continued until early 2019. Once an initial number of companies were identified and a set of internship notices were collected, a recruitment campaign was launched in Tunisia in cooperation with ANETI, the local public employment agency. In parallel, a monitoring mechanism to oversee both the companies and the interns’ satisfaction with the project was developed in Belgium. The first recruitments were confirmed by companies in the second half of 2018, and others continued throughout the first half of 2019. In February 2019, IOM also organized a training on soft skills for the interns, based on the feedback received by the first companies who engaged in the project. By August 2019, all interns had completed their placement and returned to Tunisia. In this third phase, IOM contacted Tunisian companies interested in hiring some of the returnees and, where applicable, provided additional support to other interns to identify job opportunities or to launch an entrepreneurial activity, which some interns prepared in Belgium. In some cases, interns were hired in Tunisia by their Belgian host company. IOM followed up with the interns between January and February 2020 to assess the impact of the project in the short term.