Ken Poonoosamy : “I envision Mauritius as a competitive and thriving services platform”

“During the last 50 years, we have achieved a lot by diversifying the economy from a monocrop economy back in 1968, broadening the circle of opportunities and investing in key infrastructure to build the competitiveness, resilience and productive capacity of the country.

As a nation, we have come a long way by generating greater prosperity for our people, ensuring that the youth get decent education and better paid jobs and that our elders are better protected.

What about Mauritius in the next 50 years?

It’s quite interesting to think about how Mauritius will look like in the future? How will we travel? What will we eat? How will our economy and workforce shift and how best we will address the demographic challenge? There is a prerequisite to address issues such as: what are the forces shaping the global economic outlook for the next half century? How will the economic landscape change?

How should policies adjust to cope with this change for the next 50 years? From my standpoint our three main policy challenges would be: (1) sustaining growth while reducing inequality; (2) stepping up international cooperation for more and better market access in an increasingly multipolar world and (3) addressing emerging policy trade-offs along with the demographic challenge.

I envision Mauritius in the years ahead as a competitive and thriving services platform harnessing fully opportunities from space technology, artificial intelligence, cashless society, medical science,   and marine related services. We would have transformed our manufacturing sector with nanobots and position the country as an R&D centre.  Mauritius will be an economy driven by talents, skills, knowhow, technology and new breeds of technopreneurs.

The newly negotiated market access to India and China would give new impetus to the growth of enterprises engaged in precision engineering and medical devices. Vertical farming would enable us to create greater independence in food security. Our Ocean economy would become a key engine of growth generating high paid jobs with Mauritius having its own fleet of fishing vessels.

Our enterprises would be globally competitive exporting and investing actively across Africa. Our Financial Services sector, combined with a buoyant capital market, would be the centre stage for cross border dealings, listing of funds and headquartering of global firms investing in Africa.

The country would be equipped with a modern transport system, better airline connectivity with greater levels of tourists and transit passengers boosting consumption, more international bandwidth supporting our ICT sector and a world class Port and logistics hub that makes Mauritius the natural gateway between Asia and Africa in the movement of goods.

The world will be filled with extraordinary and innovative technology. The towns and villages would have come a long way and will be part of city-wide network capable of acquiring data and delivering information and services to and from millions of devices, from dustbins to autonomous vehicles.

The possibilities for what can be achieved are endless, and the smart city is one exciting area where things will really start to take shape. By 2050 take-aways will be delivered by drones, replacing motorbikes and cars. One pizza manufacturer has already tested drone delivery, and some predict these automated flying machines will fill the skies replacing the couriers of today.

Finally, in the next 50 years, the standards and quality of life of the population will have improved significantly with enhanced strides and advances in medical research, disease treatment and access to information. Economic gains realized from harnessing all opportunities that come to our shores would translate to the wider population, reducing inequality and eradicating poverty. As a small island economy with a fragile ecological balance, Mauritius would address all issues related to climatic changes.”

Ken Poonoosamy
Deputy CEO
Economic Development Board