By John — Desalination News
A new seawater desalination plant serving Tunisia’s Sousse, Monastir and Mahdia regions has reached full completion and entered its trial and testing phase, offering a measure of relief to a coastal population that has endured repeated, prolonged water cuts in recent years. The plant is designed to produce 50,000 cubic metres of drinking water per day, with the underlying infrastructure built to allow expansion to 100,000 cubic metres daily if demand requires it.
Tunisia’s water shortages have grown increasingly severe as successive droughts and the broader effects of climate change have reduced inflows to the country’s dams and reservoirs, which historically supplied the bulk of its drinking water. In Sousse and the surrounding coastal region, that strain has translated into interruptions to piped water supply lasting several hours at a stretch — disruptions serious enough to trigger rising prices for bottled water, hoarding, and, in several cities, public protests over the reliability of the water system. Once fully operational, the new plant is expected to supply an additional volume of water equivalent to roughly 25% of peak consumption levels in the area it serves, a meaningful buffer against the kind of shortfalls that have caused unrest.
The Sousse plant is part of a broader Tunisian push toward desalination as a more climate-resilient alternative to dam-dependent water supply. Tunisia first began experimenting with desalination technology in 1995, and its most significant prior project — the Djerba plant, which cost roughly 200 million Tunisian dinars and became operational in May 2018 — has already demonstrated the model at a smaller island scale. The Sousse facility represents a considerably larger commitment to the technology, reflecting how central desalination has become to Tunisia’s water security planning as rainfall patterns become less reliable.
The plant’s completion also comes against the backdrop of a larger financing push: the World Bank approved $332.5 million in financing for Tunisia’s Water Security and Resilience Program in April 2026, a broader initiative aimed at shoring up the country’s water infrastructure beyond any single project. While that financing covers a wider set of investments than the Sousse plant alone, it underscores the scale of international support being mobilised behind Tunisia’s shift toward desalination and other resilience measures as traditional water sources come under increasing strain.
Notably, Sousse’s new plant is a distinct project from the separately inaugurated Zarat desalination plant elsewhere in Tunisia, which has drawn its own coverage in recent months — the two facilities serve different regions and should not be conflated, even though both reflect the same national trend. With the Sousse plant now in its testing phase, attention will turn to how quickly it can be brought to full operational capacity and whether its performance strengthens the case for the region’s planned expansion to 100,000 cubic metres daily.
(Source: Asharq Al-Awsat)