A meeting-debate was held on 9 January 2024 at Beït al-Hikma, the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, in Carthage, to discuss the new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Tunisian Women. Organised by the Department of Letters of the Beït al-Hikma Academy in collaboration with the Centre de Recherches, d'Études, de Documentation et d'Information sur la Femme (CREDIF), the meeting was chaired by Mabrouk Mannai, member of the Academy and Director of the project, and Thouraya Belkehia, Director General of CREDIF.
The first edition of this encyclopaedia was published by CREDIF in August 2021, coinciding with the National Day of Tunisian Women. The new edition, recently published, has been expanded to include one hundred and twenty-two exceptional stories of Tunisian women who have marked their times and the history of Tunisia, compared with one hundred and one in the original edition.
The encyclopaedia, compiled by some sixty university professors from a variety of disciplines, covers five main areas: Letters, Arts, Civilisation and History, experimental and medical sciences, as well as social and legal sciences.
Through this initiative, CREDIF aims to recognise and preserve the memory of the contributions of Tunisian women in various fields, by creating a scientific repository for researchers and young people. This repository lists the names of pioneering women in the scientific, cultural and artistic fields, as well as activists for just causes and those who have been forgotten.