Sousse gives way to Dakar to host the World Social Economy Forum in 2023

WORLD. The city of Sousse (150 km south of Tunis in the Gulf of Hammamet) will not host the Global Social Economy Forum (GSEF) in 2023. Dakar, the only competitor to host this biennial event, has been awarded the organisation and management of the event.

According to our information, the third Tunisian city - a candidate since July 2021 while Dakar has been a candidate since May 2021 - would have proposed a two-headed bid "to highlight a plural Africa". The proposal did not materialise. Sousse then withdrew in favour of the Senegalese capital.

The GSEF will thus take place for the first time on the African continent after editions in Seoul (2013 and 2014), Montreal (2016) and Bilbao (2018). The GSEF 2021 will be held from 4 to 8 October 2021 in Mexico City, mainly in virtual form.

While Dakar will take the co-presidency of the GSEF alongside Seoul, Sousse will inherit, as a consolation prize, the African co-presidency, which will be held by Imen Ouardani, deputy mayor of this city. Its adventure in the fight to host the GSEF 2023 will at least have served Sousse and Tunisia to put themselves on the international map of the SSE. But not only that.

The iesMed, Mediterranean platform of support to the social and solidarity economy (SSE) based in Barcelona - which was already working on the file of the Tunisian city for the organization of the World Forum and created, in March 2021 in Tunis, DarESS, national resource centre of the SSE -, confirms the maintenance of the Mediterranean Forum of the SSE on the blue solidarity economy (EBS). Scheduled for October, then early November, it will finally take place on 26 and 27 November 2021 in Sousse under the impetus of the municipality and its mayor Mohamed Ikbel Khaled and his deputy Imen Ouardani. So the day before the first Mediterranean Day, proclaimed in July 2021 by the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and which will take place every 28 November.
 
At the same time, according to our sources, the GSEF secretariat will move from Seoul to Bordeaux in early January 2022. The current Secretary General is French Laurence Kwark.
 

* The GSEF is an international association of local governments and civil society networks committed to the promotion of SSE (social enterprises, cooperatives, foundations, mutuals, self-help groups). The GSEF believes that systemic change starts at the local level, based on a partnership between civil society and the public and private sectors. The event is therefore co-chaired each year by a local government (represented by the mayor of the city who chairs the GSEF) and a representative of civil society networks.
The GSEF has seventy-five members from thirty-six countries (five continents), including twenty-six local governments and thirty-five SSE networks.