The Beni Hassen Municipality is located 18 km southward of Monastir city, house of the ONAS directorate premises. Located in the flat rural area of the arid Tunisian Sahel, the main economic resource is the cultivation of the olive trees. Due to the lack of surface water resources and the high level of salinity of the groundwater, it is a rainfed area that is suffering nowadays for the severe rainfall reduction caused by the climate change effects.

The WWTP managed by ONAS is located 2.6 km NNW from the centre of the town of Beni Hassen.

Nearby the Beni Hassen's WWTP, the CRDA of Monastir realized, in 2017, a piped irrigation network serving a command area of 60 hectares. Within this area, only a part of farmers, owning 30 ha (50%), accepted to irrigate their plots with Treated Waste water.

The existing tertiary treatment plant was out of order since the beginning of the MENAWARA project, because of the clogging of the sand filters and of the burning of the 8 UV lamps. Despite it, facing the 2021-2023 drought, with an emergency decree, ONAS was authorized to distribute the secondary treated water to the farmers only for the olive cultivation, by-passing the out-off order tertiary treatment. 

The MENAWARA project has foreseen the rehabilitation of this tertiary plant

👉 The Beni Hassen intervention site has been chosen by the MENAWARA project as the area showed a great potential in terms of re-use of Treated Waste Water. About 30 ha of olive trees belonging to 10 farmers will benefit from the rehabilitation of the tertiary treatment plant and the creation of a storage basin. Thanks to the intervention, better water quality will be provided to farmers increasing the amount of TWW used in agriculture thus decreasing the pressure on fresh water in the semi arid region.