PRIQH — Tunisia's National Programme to Rehabilitate Popular Neighbourhoods

The Agence de Réhabilitation et de Rénovation Urbaine (ARRU), Tunisia's national urban-rehabilitation agency, has run neighbourhood-upgrading programmes for three decades. Its largest recent phase, the Programme de Réhabilitation et d'Intégration des Quartiers d'Habitation (PRIQH 1), ran from 2012 to 2024 and targeted "quartiers populaires" — low-income neighbourhoods historically excluded from formal urban infrastructure investment.

Work included road paving, water-distribution and sewage-network extension, rainwater drainage, public lighting, and the construction of 52 sports, cultural and youth facilities plus 19 industrial units.

PRIQH 1 rehabilitated 155 neighbourhoods, reaching approximately 865,000 inhabitants across roughly 172,000 homes, at a total cost of about 617 million Tunisian dinars. The programme began covering 119 neighbourhoods and was extended three times to reach its final total of 155.

Financing combined Tunisian state funds with concessional support from the European Investment Bank, the European Union and the French Development Agency (AFD), which together covered roughly 65% of costs. Having demonstrated it could deliver and scale, ARRU launched a second phase, PRIQH 2, in 2023 — targeting a further 160 neighbourhoods across 100 municipalities in 24 governorates with a 670-million-dinar budget — indicating institutional continuity and confidence in the model's replicability, though public reporting reviewed here documents infrastructure delivery rather than independent outcome evaluation (e.g. income, health or tenure-security changes for residents).