Private AI university plans a ‘Silicon Sahel’ tech hub

A Tunisia-based higher education institution is seeking to fill an artificial intelligence (AI) skills gap in this North African country, which has hosted some successful AI-based startups but struggles to recruit AI-proficient workers.

The Pristini School of AI, launched quietly in 2023, has been building its student base and now has 130 students in its undergraduate and masters courses, said its dean, Professor Mohamed Jaoua. This includes bachelor degrees in applied informatics for more technically proficient students and a course aimed at non-scientists in business intelligence to educate future business professionals and leaders about AI.

The school also offers three masters degrees: in machine learning for business, AI and security and fintech.

There are eight permanent faculty members and three PhD-holding administrators. New academic staff will be hired once or twice a year to strengthen expertise and meet student enrolment demands.

Jaoua said Pristini is a knowledge hub creating a digitally fluent workforce. It is based in the Novation City high-tech industrial park in Sousse, Tunisia’s third-largest city and one of its business powerhouses, on the coast south of the capital, Tunis.

Part-time options for businesses

The university is currently focused on its domestic student market and, more specifically, on the growing number of businesses moving to Novation City. The concept of proximity between industry and education is to create a circular personnel economy in which education can be tailored to meet industry and business needs.

Pristini also offers companies part-time study options, and proximity for their staff – if they are Sousse-based. This reduces travel stress and saves time. These options include non-AI studies that generate the skills AI specialists need, such as English language skills.

The Pristini School of AI is also hoping to recruit from an associated high school that follows the University of Cambridge (UK)-certified A-level courses.

Jaoua, a professor of applied mathematics, was head-hunted to be part of the leadership team to develop the vision, structure and curricula for Pristini. He was one of the founders of Tunisia’s leading private university, the Esprit School of Business, which is now part of the Honoris United Universities group financed by British investment firm Actis.

Jaoua’s key goal is for the school to equip students with scientific knowledge, even those with an arts and humanities background. Jaoua said that, in developing countries, “mathematics is very cheap to teach. All you need is a blackboard and some chalk”. The problem is that the subject is often offered only to those students interested in science and engineering.

Jaoua said that one of his greatest achievements at Esprit was targeting students who focus on arts and humanities rather than on hard scientific skills. “The revolution began in the 1970s, with the idea of soft skills,” he said, “but today’s soft skills are not just about boosting communication, but also about changing the way students and businesses see and use mathematics.”

AI essential for everyone

He added: “We saw this in the pandemic when doctors were appearing regularly on TV to explain what was going on; they were talking about data.” This needed to be explained clearly for doctors to have a positive impact – communicating public data is a key deliverable in modern business education, he said, something that can be assisted by AI.

“We are not building a technological institution here. What a manager or a doctor needs to understand [these days] are algorithms and AI. So, all of this becomes essential skills for everyone.”

Noting that the development of AI and associated digital technologies have been called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, Jaoua said: “We do not want AI to be a ‘geeks-only’ subject. Right now, we need everybody to not only be literate, but to have digital skills. Everybody needs to understand statistics, algorithms, and AI,” he added, stressing that the school’s goal is “to create a skilful, intelligent end-user”.

English language lecturer Oumaima Ghezal’s classes are packed. She explained that the part-time, flexible study option that Pristini offers and the school’s proximity to businesses are already working very well.

Ghezal noted that launching the school was a calculated risk in a country where the economy is stagnant, with the International Monetary Fund projecting 1.7% GDP growth in 2024.

Looking at the surrounding area from the school’s roof, she predicted: “In five years, you will not see bare land; it will be covered with buildings.” Novation City is inviting companies to build on the land and become part of an “ecosystem and community”, she said. “It is about relocating and concentrating, with the education-business dynamic hopefully delivering a ‘Silicon Sahel’ tech hub.”

International collaboration growing

Jaoua is already planning to add new masters courses that fulfil further business needs and said he is developing international cooperation with major universities such as the US’s University of Michigan-Flint College of Innovation and Technology (UMF-CIT) that was established in 2021.

It is a 1+1 model for a double-degree programme, enabling Pristini students who have passed the first year of their masters at Pristini School of AI to attend UMF-CIT to study data analytics, data science, cyber security, computer science and information systems. Under the projected cooperation deal, up to 50 Pristini students can study at UMF-CIT for 50% of the international student rate.

Pristini has already established cooperation in the European Union with the Collège de Paris and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in France; the IMC Krems University of Applied Sciences in Austria, the University of Jaén, Spain, and the Technical University of Applied Sciences Amberg-Weiden (OTH AW) in Germany, Jaoua said. The collaboration will involve an exchange of faculty for academic and research purposes.

Ghezal said that, as a new university fighting for the first intake of undergraduate students it was tough, but Pristini benefited from attending national higher education fairs and, in Novation City, it will have a ready supply of potential new local students. Neapolis, a subsidiary of the Nabeul, Tunisia-based pharmaceutical company, Médis, which specialises in cancer drugs, has been one of the first companies taking up work-study places at the school.

Institution adds value to industry

Neapolis’ CEO Mohamed Amine Boujbel said that the company was first approached by Pristini and, having known Jaoua from his work with Esprit, they were happy to take the risk.

Boujbel said that Pristini was also involved in the selection and training of their new undergraduate recruits. “We have 12 people studying [at Pristini]; we are paying their scholarships. Six are current employees and the other six are new hires. Pristini did the initial candidate shortlist selection and we chose six out of the list they gave us and did the interviews.”

The company currently sells in Africa and the Middle East and is targeting Europe, knowing it will need solid quality control, production and business systems, Boujbel said. “We are looking to implement something to control the output, to monitor productivity, to monitor the real output, to monitor the most frequent anomaly in the production line. To have real-time feedback from production, quality control is key,” and AI can play a key role in such systems.

He said that these scholars are committed to staying with the company for a minimum of five years. “We are training our experts, and they will add value,” he said, adding that it saved the company from relying on external consultants who might be less reliable.

Meanwhile, Sagemcom, a French industrial group, is using Pristini to help train some of its 5,000 Tunisia-based engineers, managers and HR executives. Sagemcom managing director Christian Jannot said the company has opened an office in Novation Park. “Pristini has the flexibility to design a training that matches our needs, which is very important,” he noted.

Jannot said the company’s engineers are working with Pristini’s students and experts on an internal chatbot to increase productivity by centralising data within a secure networked environment. “We need to secure our data and intellectual property,” Jannot said, so this excludes using cloud-based data storage systems.

Lack of training in big data

Its next project with Pristini is to develop AI to manage log data from set-top boxes commonly used in television systems to monitor connection and technical faults and feed information back to its engineers. “Running tests takes a very long time,” Jannot said, but AI could make the process more efficient. Next year, Sagemcom will consider enrolling employees in Pristini masters courses.

Peter Johnson, founder of the international UN Sustainable Development Goals consultancy the Ayadee Foundation and a business futures consultant, said that Tunisia already produces a large number of skilful engineers, but has suffered from a brain drain of engineers with five or more years’ experience.

“Tunisia has good business schools, but there’s a lack of training in big data, business analytics and AI, so there is a gap,” he said. “So, if this school is training business people to understand the engineers, and if engineers had electives in the management section and vice versa, it would be invaluable.”