From April 6th to April 9th, MedCities carried out a mission in Tunisia in order to follow-up existing projects and start preparing new ones for the coming months. 

First, MedCities met with representatives of the Federation Nationales de Villes Tunisiennes in order to strengthen cooperation in the promotion and elaboration of City Development Strategies in Tunisian cities. The experience of Sfax and Sousse, cities that have already completed this process with the support of MedCities, is an asset that both institutions intend to replicate in other Tunisian cities. A meeting was also conducted in the headquarters of the German Cooperation Agency (GIZ) with whom MedCities is working together in several projects in the Maghreb area, including Tunisia.

Second, MedCities visited the cities of Kairouan and Bizerte with whom a joint project of waste management will start next September 2015. Those meetings were the occasion to work together in the identification of needs and the pilot projects that will be carried out during the project. The new project will be done based on the previous work done by these two cities in this domain and in coordination with other actors in order to guarantee the complementarity of the action with the existing initiatives.

Last, MedCities visited the city of Sfax which is acting as territorial antenna of MedCities in the Maghreb area. This was one of the technical assistance visits foreseen in the project of consolidation of the KTC of Sfax, financed by the Municipality of Barcelona and Barcelona Metropolitan Area, which will end in March 2016.

The mission was very fruitful in order to strengthen cooperation with Tunisian members of the network and to reinforce the decentralization of MedCities, one of the core agreements reached in the last General Assembly of the network held in Izmir last November 2014.