The A’SIMA Tunis project was invited to attend the first Coordination Committee Meeting of the EU supported programme of “Partnerships for Sustainable Cities” taking place in Brussels, Belgium, from 7 to 9 March 2023. A representative from each implementing partner organisation, namely MedCities, Area Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB), and Municipality of Tunis was present at the meeting.

The event aimed at bringing together stakeholders from city partnerships taking part in the EU-supported global programme and establishing face-to-face interactions between the different projects on a wide range of topics of common interest. The sessions of the first day dealt with strategic monitoring and communication tools as well as relevant experiences on project implementation while the second day focused on policy issues linked to the tool of city-to-city partnerships and EU engagement strategies in the area of sustainable urban development and localization of SDGs. The third and last day provided opportunities to visit relevant initiatives driven by municipal actors in Belgium, where A’SIMA Tunis partners had the opportunity to participate in a study visit to the Ecowerf inter-municipal waste management agency and to see the composting site and biogas production facility from organic waste and the eco-point for the recycling of several fractions, similar to the one being designed in Tunis municipality as part of the pilot project.

In the A’SIMA Tunis project, some progress was achieved in that field in the last few weeks, within the framework of its component 2 “Metropolitan governance on valorised waste management and inter-municipal waste management”, through the consultation workshop on the inter-municipal cooperation for the valorisation of solid waste that was held in Tunis on the 10^th of March. Twenty-seven persons, from 18 different municipalities of Greater Tunis, participated in this workshop aimed at both showing the benefits of waste valorisation and identifying potential ways to set inter-municipal collaborations to achieve it.