Tunisia’s National Institute of Statistics (INS) reported an unemployment rate of 15% in the first quarter of 2026, down 0.2 percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2025.
The number of unemployed people stood at 641,700, a decrease of 3,500. On the surface, the indicators appear to be moving in the right direction. But every table in the report deserves to be read against the grain of the official statement.
The headline figure
The 15% rate is a national average that conceals radically different realities. It masks female unemployment at 20.7%, or 8.4 points higher than the male rate of 12.3%.
Economically active women are therefore 68% more likely to be unemployed than their male counterparts, not because they are less qualified, but because the Tunisian labor market is structurally less accessible to them.
Youth unemployment: a persistent crisis without answers
In the first quarter of 2026, the unemployment rate among young people aged 15 to 24 stood at 37.5%, compared to 38.4% in the previous quarter. This figure must be viewed in its historical continuity: since 2022, youth unemployment has fluctuated between 36.8% and 41.0%, with no clear downward trend.
Over four years, the first-quarter rate moved from 38.5% (Q1 2022) to 37.5% (Q1 2026) — an improvement of just one percentage point. That is not progress; it is stagnation.
One paradox deserves attention: among young people, men (39.1%) are more affected by unemployment than women (34.1%), the reverse of the overall trend. This apparent reversal does not reflect better integration of young women into the labor market.
Rather, it shows that some young women leave the labor force prematurely, become “inactive” under the international definition of unemployment, and disappear from the statistics.
The official unemployment rate for young women is therefore artificially lowered by their withdrawal from the labor market, not by employment gains.
The diploma paradox
The report’s most worrying figure concerns university graduates. Their unemployment rate reached 24.2% in the first quarter of 2026, up 1.7 points from 22.5% in the previous quarter. While overall unemployment declined, graduate unemployment increased.
The Tunisian economy is not creating the skilled jobs that its education system produces.
The gender gap among graduates is staggering: a male university graduate faces a 14.2% unemployment rate, while a woman with the same qualifications faces a 32% rate, nearly one in three. This is not a training problem; it is a problem of structural discrimination in hiring.
The double exclusion of women
The female labor force participation rate stands at 28.9%, compared to 63.9% for men, a gap of 35 percentage points. More than 71% of working-age women are outside the labor market. Some are students or retirees.
But an unquantifiable share in this report consists of discouraged workers who have given up searching for employment. Since the international definition of unemployment requires active job seeking, these women are excluded from the unemployment count. Mechanically, this lowers the official rate without reflecting actual employment.
What the document does not say
The INS does not publish the underemployment rate in this release. The 3,626,300 “employed” people include a substantial proportion of workers in the informal sector, counted as employed as long as they worked at least one hour during the reference week.
Agriculture, which accounts for 15.7% of total employment, is the largest reservoir of this precarious informal work.
The report also makes no mention of skilled emigration, which mechanically removes graduates from Tunisia’s statistical registry and therefore depresses the unemployment rate among degree holders.
Regional disparities are largely absent as well. The only geographical breakdown distinguishes between urban areas (14.4%) and rural areas (16.5%), with no data by governorate. Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid, and Gafsa, whose historical unemployment rates regularly exceed 20% to 25%, remain invisible in the report.
Finally, the report contains an unexplained anomaly in the fourth quarter of 2024 across all its tables: the labor force suddenly jumps to 4.532 million people (compared to 4.084 to 4.268 million in all other periods), the female participation rate reaches 34.9% (compared to the usual 25%–29%), and graduate unemployment falls to 16.7% (versus 22%–25% elsewhere).
No methodological note accompanies these breaks in the data series. This absence undermines the comparability of the published figures.
In conclusion, the slight improvement from 15.2% to 15.0% is real, but negligible in light of the structural realities.
Youth unemployment remains stuck between 37% and 41%. Graduate unemployment is rising again. Women remain massively excluded from the labor market, and those who do participate face an unemployment rate 68% higher than that of men.
The INS report rigorously measures what it measures. What it does not measure reveals the core of the problem.
