The Municipality of Marseille undertook a technical assistance to the city of Sousse related with public lighting management and improvement of the energy consumption in public buildings. The city of Sousse had identified the need to improve the management of the electricity and lighting in municipal buildings and facilities, as part of the comprehensive definition of the strategic issues for the future development of the city, done under the USUDS project.

The two cities identified possible lines of cooperation for a future framework of mid-term cooperation, including:

• Analysis of the state of affairs, including the description of the lighting, actual consumption, current budget and desired one, the organization set up;
• A number of actions to be carried out in the technical, budgetary and organizational domain:

* Conducting a thorough diagnosis,
* Completion of a facilities management scheme in the context of a light map
* Development of a multiannual program, defining investment priorities and establishing the technical specifications,
§ Budget assessment (cost / benefit),
§ Development of specifications in the field of management, organization, communication and training;

A second mission has been undertaken during September 2014 in order to further explore these possibilities for the identification of mid and long term cooperative projects to be carried by the two cities. A technical delegation of Sousse visited experiences of sustainable and energy saving public lighting in Marseille and worked together with the technical services of the City of Marseille in defining interventions for improving the energy efficiency of public lighting in the long term. A joint project has been identified, with proposed interventions in energy efficient urban lighting in a spontaneous neighborhood of Sousse, the lighting of monuments’ sites in the Medina as well as the lighting of public buildings.

After these weeks of technical exchanges a new working program has been established to determine possible areas of cooperation between Sousse and Marseille on Sustainable Development of territories and Energy Efficiency, with the objective to form part of a financing program of the UNDP and French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2015.

Advancing in this collaboration is the objective of the third mission of technical assistance that is currently taking place in Sousse, from the 6th till the 10th October. The delegation of Marseille is visiting Sousse in order to identify, together with Sousse representatives, the concrete places of intervention in the Medina and in the southern area of the city, determine the project activities and interventions and work with the funding organisations in the definition of the project.