Initialed by Younes Sekkouri, Minister of Economic Inclusion, Small Business, Employment and Skills, and Nasreddine Nsibi, Tunisia's Minister of Employment and Vocational Training, as part of the Regional Conference for North Africa, this statement is a call for a new model of job creation through investment in entrepreneurship and SMEs.

In a statement to the press on the sidelines of the signing ceremony, Sekkouri said that this initiative is a strong paradigm shift, saying that this declaration of Rabat knows a craze of several African countries, including Egypt and Nigeria and many others.

The Moroccan minister has in this sense stressed the need to go through major reforms. "Morocco is fully in, through a government program very ambitious for everything that is innovative enterprises, entrepreneurship and VSEs."

This goes "first by an adequate legal framework, new funding, enhanced market access and quality support, in addition to a major strategy of support for employment and vocational training to help VSEs to hang on to the market and be competitive in the overall march of the national economy," he specified.

For his part, Tunisia's Nsibi told MAP that Rabat's call is "a kind of consensus that we will work on common issues facing Morocco, Tunisia and the region," noting that both parties will be able to count on the support of several partners, including the platform MENA jobs, the African Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank, the French Development Agency (AFD) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Specifically, it is to obtain jobs much more resilient and resistant to crises and based on information technology and communication, in promising sectors currently in the global economy, said the Tunisian minister.

"We want our young people today leave their respective countries to conquer other markets in the world," he said, arguing that young Moroccans and Tunisians are qualified and capable of being competitive regionally and internationally.