AI-Equipped Emergency Operation Rooms — Tunisia's AFD-Financed Modernization of Civil Protection's Number 198

Tunisia's national Civil Protection service is modernizing its 198 emergency number with a 150-million-dinar (about $51 million) loan from the French Development Agency (AFD), reported by Ecofin Agency, iAfrica.com and African Manager in 2025-2026. The program is part of the digital-transformation pillars set out by Minister of Communication Technologies Sofiene Hemissi in November 2024.

The core of the project is the creation of 24 operation rooms equipped with artificial-intelligence tools intended to locate incidents quickly and optimize response routes for emergency crews, alongside new equipment such as robots for handling toxic or radioactive substances and drones for field operations. A second specialized rescue unit is planned for El Jem in Mahdia governorate to extend coverage to southern Tunisia, backed by light search-and-rescue teams of about 20 experts each, distributed across the territory.

Implementation is expected to span several years from loan approval, and as of the most recent reporting no operation rooms had yet gone live and no incident-response or accuracy data had been published — this is a financed, planned modernization rather than a proven, evaluated deployment, and should be read as an early-stage case.

Read the full analysis: https://iafrica.com/tunisia-secures-51m-loan-to-modernize-civil-protection-with-ai-drones-and-digital-operations