Faculty of Economics Welcome

The Sabat Sfakys project, the fruit of cooperation between the cities of Grenoble (France) and Sfax (Tunisia) and collaboration between their universities, focuses on the Medina, the historic center of Sfax, which has been home to the workshops of leather and footwear workers for several decades.
The project is being carried out against a backdrop of deterioration of the Medina's architectural heritage, which is difficult and costly to maintain, and of crisis in the sector, reflected in falling production volumes and major difficulties in passing on this traditional know-how.
The aim of this project is to move from a vertical approach to revitalizing the sector, to a more global objective of breathing new life into the Medina.
Sabat Sfakys supports the organization of players from a wide range of backgrounds, who are passionate about and already involved in preserving the Medina and this know-how. These include industrialists and craftsmen from the sector but also from the activities that gravitate around it, players from civil society and associations, academics and multidisciplinary researchers.
After several months of research, in March 2018, twenty students from Sfax and Grenoble from a variety of backgrounds (territorial economics and development, fundamental economics, marketing, product and space design, communication and environmental sciences) met to conduct field surveys on site.
This first edition of inter-university cooperation has a promising future ahead of it, as the field surveys have led to the creation of a pilot group of craftsmen and industrialists to implement the project. A student from Grenoble has also been recruited for an end-of-studies internship to continue the progress of a project that would benefit from being repeated in the years to come. The aim of this internship is to formalize a group of industrialists/artisans and propose a three-year strategy to revitalize the Medina's leather/shoe sector.
This experience is not a first; for several years now, it has been part of aField Investigation for a Territorial Project seminar in the Territorial Economics and Development Master's program, and represents a pedagogical innovation in a training program that knows how to combine theory and practice.