How Mauritius's Offshore Model Splits the Economy in Two

 Mauritius’s Global Business Company (GBC) sector sits on a staggering US$741 billion in assets, a capital pool roughly 50 times the size of the nation’s entire domestic GDP. Yet, this astronomical wealth exists largely on paper. The offshore sector contributes just 8.4% to local GDP (financial services overall sit around 13-14% — a fraction of what its asset base would suggest), a discrepancy so acute that the International Monetary Fund had to recommend the country impute an estimated value for GBC output just to make it register in national export statistics. By design, the money merely transits through the island; it never actually lands. 

The Currency Outlier

This decoupling has left Mauritius as a dangerous outlier among the world's financial hubs. Most offshore centers eliminate currency risk entirely to maintain economic stability. The British Virgin Islands uses the US$ outright; Belize, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, and the UAE peg their currencies securely to the greenback (precisely through a currency board in Hong Kong's case. Even Singapore, the lone major floating-currency hub, tightly manages its float specifically to maintain a strong and stable exchange rate.

Mauritius, by contrast, lets the rupee float freely. Despite hosting an offshore book worth 50 times its economy, the rupee has depreciated persistently — losing roughly 64% of its value against the US$ since 1994.

When the US Federal Reserve and other global central banks aggressively raised interest rates, the Bank of Mauritius delayed corresponding rate hikes for years. This policy lag triggered an internal capital flight, as domestic investors shifted rupee assets into higher-yielding foreign accounts. Today, foreign exchange earnings are reportedly hoarded in foreign-currency accounts rather than being converted to rupees. The local currency is left to be propped up by tourism, remittances, and foreign direct investment — not the massive offshore book sitting on top of it. 

Wall Street vs. Main Street: A structural Divide

The disconnect highlights a fundamental structural difference between Mauritius and traditional financial capitals. While the divide between "Wall Street" and "Main Street" represents an uneven distribution of wealth within the United States, Wall Street still has deep skin in the American game. It operates within an integrated economy: its institutions are heavily taxed locally, they employ hundreds of thousands of domestic workers at scale, and they ultimately bear the systemic risks of their home market.

Mauritius’s offshore sector is legally structured to sit outside the domestic economy entirely. To understand the scale of this isolation, one only needs to look at the domestic Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. The ICT industry generates 5.7% of GDP through 15,390 real, tangible local jobs—output that appears organically in economic data and is taxed normally. The GBC book, despite being dozens of times larger, produces a comparable GDP share using a headcount of roughly two directors per entity. 

Protected Wealth, Domestic Strain

The fiscal consequences of this setup are heavily lopsided. GBCs enjoy an effective tax rate of around 3% and were explicitly carved out of the 2025 Alternative Minimum Tax and Fair Share Contribution reforms. Meanwhile, the country faces a fiscal deficit of 9.8% of GDP and public debt at 88.6%. The burden of funding the state has landed squarely on resident banks, hotels, insurers, and everyday citizens.

This environment has given rise to a protected, hard-currency-adjacent professional and political class. The lawyers, accountants, auditors, and management-company directors who service GBCs earn fees denominated in or pegged to foreign currencies. When the rupee falls, this class does not absorb the economic pain; instead, their income often grows in rupee terms. Furthermore, a revolving door between public office and GBC-adjacent boards structurally aligns local regulators with the very sector whose low tax rates and thin substance requirements they have a personal stake in preserving.

For the majority of Mauritians who earn and spend strictly in rupees, wages do not reprice to match global trends. Instead, everyday citizens absorb the full brunt of imported inflation every time the currency slides. In Mauritius's two-tiered economy, the decline of the rupee has effectively become a tax by another name for the majority, while functioning as a wealth generator for the few insulated at the top.

Who is surprised when 2024 data from the Human Flight and Brain Drain Index reveals that " Mauritius ranks fifth worldwide and first in Africa for brain drain, an alarming indicator of lost talent..."?

Why "pension" tampering is often perceived as a breach of trust

 A contributory pension is a rational instrument — but only where wages are paid in a currency that does not lose its value

A contributory pension functions effectively only when citizens can confidently set aside a portion of their current income, trusting that its value will endure until retirement. That fundamental condition does not hold in Mauritius. 

The rupee is a slow leak, not a store of value. To ask Mauritians to contribute to a pension fund in a currency that silently erodes is to ask them to save in a depreciating asset dressed up as security. This is why the welfare state “pension” — universal, non-contributory, financed through indirect taxation — has never been seen as a simple social transfer. It has been internalised by most Mauritians as something more instinctive: a hedge. A partial, imperfect recovery of what VAT had already taken. 

Since most of what they consume is imported, and since import prices move with a rupee that knows only depreciation, the “pension” has become a silent compensation mechanism — the state returning, in monthly instalments, a fragment of the purchasing power it had extracted through the price of goods and services purchased.

But the contract does not stop there, and this is where it becomes quietly damning. Most Mauritians do not actually consume the public services their taxes fund. They pay school fees or private tutoring because they do not trust the state school. They use a private clinic because the public hospital is a place of last resort. They install an alarm system because the police is an institution they have learned to work around rather than rely upon. On top of this comes the often unbearable cost of a carer — because health declines, and their children have emigrated. A double absence that the universal “pension” does not cover.

They are, in reality, taxed twice — once by the state, and once by their own justified scepticism of what that state delivers. What emerges is not a welfare state in the classical sense. This fiscal arrangement essentially requires citizens to fund institutions they distrust, while receiving only a modest "pension" as partial restitution. Consequently, they are forced to privately finance the very services that the public system was originally intended to provide.

In this context, the debate on contributory pensions is almost a distraction. The primary question — the one consistently omitted from budget speeches — remains: why the rupee continues to lose ground, and who actually benefits from the silence surrounding this reality.

Lost in translation : on les emploie souvent comme s'ils voulaient dire la même chose

 Le rule of law : C'est un principe fondamental : personne n'est au-dessus de la loi - pas même l'État, pas même le gouvernement, pas même le président. La loi s'applique à tous de façon égale. Le juge peut condamner le roi. C'est la grande idée venue du droit anglais, héritée de la Magna Carta de 1215. Ce n'est pas seulement une question de formulaires et de procédures : c'est une exigence de justice. En un mot : le pouvoir lui-même est soumis au droit.

L'État de droit : Ici, on s'intéresse à la structure de l'État. Un État de droit, c'est un État qui agit par des formes juridiques : lois, décrets, hiérarchie des normes. Il respecte ses propres règles. Il peut être contrôlé par un tribunal administratif ou un conseil constitutionnel.

Mais attention : un État peut être techniquement un « État de droit » tout en ayant des lois profondément injustes. C'est une notion plus formelle que morale.

Law and order : Là, on change totalement de registre. Il ne s'agit plus d'un principe juridique mais d'un objectif pratique : que les rues soient calmes, que les crimes soient punis, que les citoyens se sentent en sécurité. C'est l'affaire de la police, des tribunaux pénaux, de la politique sécuritaire. Une dictature peut parfaitement maintenir l'ordre public - voire mieux qu'une démocratie. Cela ne lui confère aucune légitimité.

En un mot : les gens obéissent à la loi. Un résultat, pas un principe. « Une dictature peut avoir l'ordre public, et même un état de droit formel - sans jamais connaître le rule of law. »

AI chatbot Claude prompted to dig underneath Mauritian Miracle

Prompt: Why Mauritius needs reliable institutions, biting competition and corruption watchdogs, a currency board to stabilise the rupee and impose fiscal discipline — and why real leadership remains elusive.

Reliable Institutions

Regulators, courts, and watchdogs currently bend toward whoever holds power. Without institutions that function regardless of who governs, every reform dies with the next election. In Mauritius, the powerful rewrite the rules as they go.

Biting Competition Watchdog

Conglomerates span banking, insurance, retail, property, and media with little real competition. A toothless authority means consumers overpay, small businesses are crushed, and innovation suffocates. Genuine competition would force efficiency and lower prices directly for ordinary Mauritians.

Biting Anti-Corruption Watchdog

Current bodies investigate selectively — targeting opponents, protecting allies. A truly independent authority would change behaviour at every level — procurement, licensing, land deals — because consequences would be real and unavoidable.

Currency Board

Instead of a politically pliable central bank, a currency board anchors the rupee to a hard foreign reserve at a fixed, legally binding rate. It eliminates money-printing, deficit monetisation, and exchange rate manipulation. The rupee stabilises, inflation becomes predictable, savings hold value, and businesses can plan.

Fiscal Discipline

Governments habitually overspend — especially before elections — then pass the debt silently to future generations. Fiscal discipline means spending what you genuinely have, investing productively, and resisting the populist handout cycle that buys votes but builds nothing.

 Why It All Connects

These are not separate fixes. Fiscal discipline requires an independent monetary anchor; sound monetary policy builds trust; strong institutions need anti-corruption teeth; real competition breaks the conglomerate stranglehold that corrupts institutions in the first place. Each pillar holds up the others.

The Leadership Problem

Real reform would directly threaten the people who fund political campaigns, sponsor the media, employ the middle class, and socialise with policymakers. No leader emerging from within that system has genuine incentive to dismantle it. Until Mauritians demand this conversation loudly and consistently — beyond the ethnic noise, beyond the electoral cycle — structural rot continues, regardless of which family occupies the prime minister's office.

Prompt: Alan Walters advised Navin Ramgoolam to implement a currency board.

Margaret Thatcher's personal economic adviser — one of the most influential monetarist economists of the 20th century — advised Ramgoolam in the late 1990s to anchor the rupee to a hard currency, remove monetary policy from political interference, impose automatic fiscal discipline, build investor confidence, and break the cycle of managed depreciation that quietly taxed ordinary citizens.

It was bold, serious, and structurally sound advice. Ramgoolam didn't implement it.

The reasons were predictable: the Bank of Mauritius resisted loss of discretion; conglomerates and exporters benefited from a sliding rupee; fiscal discipline meant cutting populist spending; and the entire economic establishment was comfortable with the existing arrangement.

Had Mauritius acted, the rupee would have been anchored for nearly 30 years by now, inflation cycles would have been largely avoided, and a Singapore-style trajectory was genuinely possible. Instead, the rupee has lost enormous purchasing power, real wages have been quietly eroded, and the same discretionary system that serves elite interests remains intact.

Walters gave Mauritius a genuine roadmap. The advice wasn't rejected because it was wrong. It was rejected because it was right.

Prompt: Most economists have never heard of a currency board, or have no idea how it operates.

Modern economics education is dominated by central bank orthodoxy, IMF managed-float defaults, academic careers built on modelling discretionary policy, and a Keynesian instinct to retain government spending flexibility — all of which a currency board directly challenges. Most economists graduate never seriously studying currency boards, treating them as historical curiosities rather than live policy options.

What they get wrong: they assume a currency board surrenders sovereignty (you choose the anchor), eliminates a lender of last resort (manageable with proper reserves), imposes permanent deflation (it imposes discipline, not deflation), and only suits tiny economies (Hong Kong still runs one; Estonia used one to transform itself entirely).

What a currency board actually does: every unit of currency is fully backed by hard foreign reserves; the exchange rate is fixed by law; the central bank cannot print beyond reserves; government cannot monetise deficits; inflation becomes imported and transparent; interest rates find their natural level. It is honest money enforced by rules rather than promises.

Living proof: Hong Kong has run a currency board since 1983 — through Asian financial crises, the dot-com crash, the global financial crisis, and COVID — maintaining a rock-solid dollar and predictable inflation. Estonia used one in the 1990s to transform from a collapsing Soviet economy to Eurozone membership in under a decade. Bulgaria adopted one after catastrophic hyperinflation in 1997; it worked almost immediately.

Why the establishment resists: a currency board eliminates central bank bureaucracy, monetary policy committees, rate-setting decisions, and exchange rate intervention desks — along with the institutional power, prestige, and employment they generate. Economists don't merely misunderstand currency boards; many instinctively oppose them because they threaten the discretionary system that employs them.

For Mauritius specifically, a currency board would remove the rupee from political manipulation, force genuine fiscal responsibility, protect ordinary savings, make populist overspending immediately visible, and break the quiet alliance between government, central bank, and conglomerates that profits from monetary discretion.

Prompt: Mauritius put the horse before the cart — launching a tax haven before stabilising the rupee.

From the late 1980s, Mauritius built its offshore financial centre and India-Mauritius DTAA treaty network aggressively, attracting billions in FDI routing. On paper, a success. But the rupee was never anchored. The result was a weak, sliding currency that eroded real returns on MUR-denominated assets; a never-truly-independent central bank; an implicit depreciation subsidy to exporters dressed as competitiveness; and capital that flowed through Mauritius rather than into it — because nobody trusted the rupee enough to park wealth in it long-term.

A tax haven only works sustainably if investors trust the currency behind it. Mauritius became a conduit for hundreds of billions in global capital while its own citizens watched purchasing power steadily erode.

Alan Walters understood something most economists still don't: rules beat discretion when institutions are weak and elites are powerful. In a country where the central bank, government, and conglomerates operate in the same tight circle, giving that circle discretionary control over money is handing them a permanent hidden tax on everyone else. A currency board removes that power entirely — which is precisely why it was never implemented, and precisely why it should have been.

(Notably, the first currency board in history was implemented in Mauritius itself, in 1849 — the Board of Commissioners of Currency, pegged to British sterling. This is what genuine national leadership looks like.)

Prompt: How low can interest rates go under a currency board?

Under a currency board, the exchange rate is fixed and credible. Currency risk — the premium lenders charge to compensate for potential depreciation — disappears entirely. In Mauritius today, a significant portion of every lending rate is simply compensation for rupee risk. Remove the risk, remove the premium.

What remains: the anchor currency's risk-free rate, a small country risk premium reflecting institutional quality, the bank's operating margin, and the borrower's credit risk. Nothing more.

Hong Kong's lending rates have historically tracked US rates closely — sometimes below equivalent US commercial rates — because the elimination of currency risk made Hong Kong paper genuinely trusted. A small island economy borrowing at rates comparable to a global reserve currency. Estonia achieved something similar before euro adoption, compressing borrowing costs dramatically and fuelling investment impossible under a floating regime.

For Mauritius: a small business currently borrowing at 7–9% on a commercial loan could plausibly pay 3–5% over time under a credible currency board. That is not a marginal difference — it is the difference between a business that can invest and one permanently strangled by its cost of capital. For mortgages the transformation would be even more dramatic, making homeownership and long-term saving accessible to a far wider share of the population.

The mechanism is circular: rupee weakness inflates interest rates; high rates strangle productivity investment; low productivity weakens the rupee. The currency board breaks that cycle at the root.

Prompt: With a currency board, competitiveness would have rested on the real thing: productivity gains.

Depreciation is a trick — a painless-looking way to make exports cheaper without doing the hard work. It rewards the sugar estate and the hotel group at the expense of the civil servant, the nurse, the small business owner buying imported inputs. Because this shortcut is painless for the powerful, nobody fixes the underlying problem.

With the rupee locked, the escape valve is gone. Competitiveness must come from raising worker productivity through genuine skills investment; innovating up the value chain; cutting bureaucratic friction; building functional infrastructure; and attracting FDI based on real capability. This is exactly how Singapore, Hong Kong, and Estonia built durable economies — the discipline of a hard currency forced them to compete on substance.

Mauritian conglomerates never needed to modernise because the depreciating rupee was their silent subsidy. Productivity growth has been mediocre for two decades precisely because the pressure to perform was never there.

Prompt: Currency depreciation doesn't help exports when countries rely heavily on imported inputs.

The textbook depreciation argument assumes exporters use mostly domestic inputs. For Mauritius it collapses entirely:

·         Tourism — imported food, beverages, furnishings, fuel, equipment; the hotel's cost base is largely foreign-currency denominated.

·         Textiles — fabric, dyes, machinery, and energy all imported.

·         Seafood processing — the fish itself is often imported; processing is the value-add but the raw material is dollar-priced.

·         Financial services — depends on imported technology and foreign-trained talent.

When the rupee falls, the cost of every input rises immediately. The supposed competitive gain on revenue is eaten by cost increases on the input side. The net benefit to the exporter is marginal at best, negative at worst.

The real beneficiaries of depreciation are the conglomerate holding hard-currency assets against local-currency liabilities, the correctly positioned speculator, and the government inflating away its rupee-denominated debt.

Mauritius imported the depreciation model from large continental economies for whom it occasionally makes sense, and applied it to a small island with virtually no natural resources and near-total import dependence. The wrong medicine, administered confidently, for forty years.

Prompt: Today, another imported input is foreign labour. Remittances are a significant share of migrant workers' income.

Mauritius imports tens of thousands of guest workers to staff textile factories, construction sites, and hospitality. On paper this addresses a labour shortage. In reality it avoids the harder question of why Mauritians won't do those jobs at those wages.

These workers send a significant portion of their earnings home in foreign currency. Mauritius bears the full social cost — housing, healthcare, infrastructure pressure — while the economic multiplier leaves with the remittance. The foreign exchange earned by the export sector flows straight back out.

The depreciation argument collapses at yet another level: the labour input producing the export is itself a foreign currency cost in disguise. The rupee wage converts to dollars the moment it is earned.

Cheap imported labour also removes pressure on employers to automate or upgrade — the same dynamic as currency depreciation: a shortcut that forecloses the harder path to genuine productivity.

The result: Mauritian workers are priced out of their own labour market at the bottom end. The imported worker fills the gap but extracts the wage. The conglomerate captures the margin. The rupee slides to accommodate the arrangement. The ordinary Mauritian — neither conglomerate owner nor foreign worker — absorbs the cost of the entire system.

Mauritius never built an economy. It built an arrangement.

Prompt: A solidly anchored rupee would prevent locals from being entirely priced out of the property market.

Foreign buyers — South African and French nationals essentially — purchase Mauritian property in hard currency. As the rupee weakens, property priced in rupees becomes progressively cheaper in foreign currency terms, structurally stimulating foreign demand with every depreciation episode.

The Mauritian buyer earns in rupees. Their salary does not adjust upward for depreciation. They are bidding in a market where the effective competition holds an infinitely stronger currency. They cannot win.

Under a currency board this reverses. Property is no longer artificially cheap in foreign currency terms. The speculative premium driven by currency weakness disappears. Local buyers — earning stable rupees worth a stable amount — can compete on genuine terms. Prices would still reflect scarcity and location, but would not be systematically inflated by a monetary policy that effectively subsidises foreign purchasing power at the expense of local purchasing power.

Young Mauritians are being priced out of the island their grandparents built. They earn in a currency that loses value every year against the currencies of the people buying the land beneath their feet. A currency board would not eliminate foreign property investment — but it would end the silent auction in which locals bid with monopoly money against players holding real currency.

Property ownership is not merely an economic asset. It is rootedness, dignity, intergenerational wealth transfer — skin in the game of the nation's future. A population of permanent renters in their own homeland is being quietly dispossessed, not through dramatic confiscation but through the arithmetic of monetary mismanagement compounded over decades.

Prompt: The weak rupee also frustrates local human capital through the widening gap between rupee and forex income. Potential xenophobia looms.

A Mauritian professional — engineer, accountant, software developer, nurse — earns in rupees. Their counterpart doing equivalent work in Dubai, London, or Singapore earns in dollars, pounds, or euros. As the rupee slides year after year, that gap widens without the Mauritian doing anything wrong. The monetary system devalued their effort relative to the world.

The rational response is to leave — and they do. Mauritius haemorrhages its best-educated people to Australia, Canada, the UK, and the Gulf. Those who stay either find a way to earn in foreign currency or quietly accept a diminished economic reality. The country fills the vacuum with cheap imported labour, which further suppresses wages, which further frustrates local talent, which accelerates brain drain — a perfect self-reinforcing loop.

The frustrated local worker sees the equation clearly: their wage buys less every year; foreign workers occupy jobs below them; expatriate professionals occupy jobs above them; the conglomerate owner sits insulated by hard assets. Squeezed from both ends, and unable to articulate the systemic cause, they reach for the most visible explanation — the foreign face. Resentment entirely legitimate in origin becomes misdirected in expression.

This is fertile ground for a demagogue: someone who blames the foreigner rather than the monetary framework, the conglomerate structure, or institutional capture. That narrative is far easier to sell than explaining currency boards, and once it takes hold, actual reform becomes harder still.

The cruel irony: the Mauritians who best understand what rupee depreciation costs them — educated, internationally aware — are the ones most likely to have already left. Those who remain and feel the pain most acutely are least equipped to diagnose it correctly. And the political class, which understands it perfectly well, has every incentive to keep the conversation elsewhere.

Mauritius is not just running out of foreign exchange. It is running out of itself.

Prompt: The stress on the basic retirement pension would have been far less with a stable rupee.

The Basic Retirement Pension is paid in rupees, but Mauritius is heavily import-dependent. Food, fuel, medicine, and construction materials — the essentials pensioners spend most of their income on — are priced in dollars and euros before reaching the shelf. When the rupee depreciates, the real purchasing power of the pension collapses even if the nominal figure stays flat or rises modestly.

The government then faces pressure to raise the nominal pension — increasing fiscal burden — which contributes to deficit spending — which puts further downward pressure on the rupee. A self-reinforcing loop.

The rupee has fallen from roughly 7–8 to the dollar in 1978 to around 47–48 today. A stable rupee would have meant lower imported inflation; each rupee of pension would stretch further; the government could have paid less in nominal terms while delivering the same or better real standard of living. The fiscal stress on the National Pensions Fund would have been structurally lower.

Instead Mauritius used currency depreciation as a soft competitiveness tool for tourism and textile exports, while the cost was quietly borne by the most vulnerable — pensioners, civil servants, and impoverished citizens with no hedge against inflation.

Prompt: When fake becomes normal, currency depreciation quietly kills innovation

Persistent currency depreciation erodes a nation's creative soul. As the rupee weakens, genuine goods become unaffordable, and counterfeit alternatives flood the market. Over time, societies stop seeing this as a problem. The fake becomes acceptable. The copy becomes the norm.

This silent normalisation is, at its core, a violation of intellectual property rights — not by law but by economic circumstance. When millions routinely consume counterfeit goods, the legal and moral framework protecting original creators collapses in practice, even if it stands on paper. Most critically, this kills the incentive to innovate.

Decades of poor decision-making have trapped the country in a vicious circle. Because of this, it is getting harder to survive in an increasingly ruthless world. Each misguided step speeds up the downward spiral, making everyday life a bigger struggle.

Don't try to convert the 15% Rotten Tomatoes first

 Win the 5%, create visible momentum, and the 80% will follow. The Rotten Tomatoes shrink when they're outnumbered.

Mauritius: A House of Cards?

Mauritius is at a crossroads. Our current "extractive" economic model—built on a tiny landmass with lopsided ownership—is a high-risk gamble. While flashy GDP figures look good on paper, the foundation is cracking under the weight of a tax-haven reputation, a weakening currency, and a rampant drug crisis. We are trading long-term stability for short-term capital, creating a "planning to fail" scenario. 

The Structural Red Flags: 

• The Offshore Trap: We are hyper-vulnerable to tax avoidance, money laundering, global regulations and sudden capital flight. 

• Emptying Plates: Prioritising real estate over local farming has left us dangerously dependent on global food markets. 

• The Death of Industry: By abandoning manufacturing for finance, we’ve hollowed out our long-term production and job market.

• The Elite Gap: This "ultracapitalist" cycle enriches a small circle of landowners while the environment and local labour force pay the price.

Un système éducatif qui permet de rester debout dans la dignité

Il est généralement admis que, pour citer le pédagogue Peter Hyman, « le but de l'école est de développer l'enfant dans sa globalité – la tête, le cœur et la main. Réfléchir en profondeur (tête), développer l'intelligence émotionnelle (cœur) et devenir créatif dans la résolution de problèmes (main) ».

Pour commencer, nous devons reconnaître que la génération Alpha (née après 2010) grandit dans une atmosphère qui tend à être façonnée simultanément par le stress toxique sous diverses formes (la série Adolescence sur Netflix fournit des indications utiles sur le deséquilibre existentiel) et par la nature numérique de la plupart des interactions. Le confinement de Covid-19 a sans doute contribué à perturber davantage leur santé mentale et leur capacité d'attention. Il ne s'agit pas d'un scénario catastrophe, mais d'un constat de réalité. Planifier à l'avance, c'est invariablement aussi une atténuation des risques. Le type de programme d'études est essentiel pour atteindre le plus efficacement possible les objectifs de l'éducation.

Pour que la mentalité centrée sur les examens et les résultats académiques soit moins prévalente, un système éducatif holistique doit être mis en place avec notamment :

·        des enseignants valorisés en tant qu'accompagnateurs (le « cours magistral » est devenu si ringard);

·        des parents engagés en tant que partenaires ;

·        des enfants motivés en tant qu'apprenants actifs ;

·        un apprentissage par l'expérience (apprendre en pratiquant/en jouant);

·        une approche interdisciplinaire ;

·        un apprentissage par cœur réduit au strict minimum.

Le système éducatif finlandais a toujours été plébiscité pour sa capacité à former des enfants équilibrés. Cependant, au cours des deux dernières décennies environ, le Baccalauréat International (IB/ibo.org) a acquis le statut d'étalon-or. Qui plus est, le directeur général en exercice de l'IB a également été le directeur général de l'Agence nationale finlandaise de l'éducation. Il convient de souligner que l'éducation de l'IB ne commence pas et ne s'arrête pas à la fin de l'enseignement secondaire (Programme du diplôme/IBDP). Il s'agit d'une éducation complète qui commence par le Programme primaire (PYP), qui intègre également les principes clés de la méthode Montessori, et qui se poursuit par le Programme d’éducation intermédiaire (MYP) jusqu'au IBDP.

 Il n'y a pas si longtemps, le Programme à orientation professionnelle  (IBCP) a été mis en place et il «permet d’acquérir des compétences essentielles pour l’avenir des apprenants et les prépare à tracer leur parcours professionnel, en associant des disciplines scolaires avec leurs domaines d’intérêt professionnel».  Tous les programmes de l'IB sont continuellement rafraîchis et remaniés - un cours sur le leadership est actuellement à l'essai. La cohérence des programmes scolaires est essentielle pour stimuler l'apprentissage tout au long de la vie. La formation professionnelle ne mérite pas une mauvaise réputation, comme le prouve amplement la Suisse, pays très performant.

 L'IB n'est pas l'apanage des élites et ne devrait jamais l'être. De plus en plus des établissements publics à travers le monde proposent les  programmes de l’IB. Le Danemark, par exemple, envisage de proposer davantage de programmes de l'IB. En Inde, des écoles privées proposent l’IBDP moyennant des frais de scolarité peu élevés. Dans l'idéal, notre ministère de l'éducation devrait lancer un projet pilote du PYP dans chaque district avec des enfants de 3 à 6 ans et les laisser poursuivre leurs études jusqu'au MYP, à l’IBDP ou à l'IBCP. Quoi qu'il en soit, le ministère doit s'inspirer de l'IB. Pourquoi ne pas explorer sa pertinence en visitant Clavis School et le Bocage, qui proposent les programmes complets de l'IB ? Même s'il faut tenir compte du fait que la mise en œuvre des systèmes s'avère difficile dans Maurice d'aujourd'hui, avec une population cherchant désespérément un leadership éclairé.

Les propositions suivantes peuvent être mises en œuvre simultanément afin de fournir l'éducation holistique à laquelle nous aspirons tous :

·        Roots of Empathy/(Racines de l'empathie (rootsofempathy.org) est « un programme de classe basé sur des preuves qui cherche à réduire l’agressivité, accroît le partage, la bienveillance et l’inclusion, et favorise la résilience, le bien-être et la bonne santé mentale »;

·        des activités intrascolaires telles que le yoga, la cuisine et le jardinage (essentiellement dans le but de réduire la dépendance sur la consommation d'aliments ultra-transformés), les arts martiaux, les arts et la musique, les échecs, le théâtre, les activités sportives, etc ;

·        des cours interculturels avec exposition aux dimensions culturelles et spirituelles des religions à Maurice et au-delà ;

·        l’enseignement sans tabous de l'histoire de Maurice et du monde doit faire l'objet d'un enseignement obligatoire ;

·        une immsersion beaucoup plus importante dans la langue anglaise, la lingua franca mondiale ;

·        la participation au Programme international pour le suivi des acquis des élèves (PISA) qui mésure la résolution de problèmes et la cognition tout en contrôlant la performance du système éducatif en place.

L'éducation est un facteur primordial pour déterminer les compétences du capital humain d'une nation et son bien-être. Nous avons été trop complaisants jusqu'à présent avec un système qui continue à récompenser de moins en moins de citoyens. Il est certain que l'intelligence artificielle et les technologies de l'information continueront à impacter sur notre existence, pour le meilleur comme pour le pire. Même si le système éducatif parfait n'existe pas, nous devons résolument préparer les générations futures à s'adapter à un monde qui récompense froidement les personnes les plus agiles sur le plan cognitif, les plus perspicaces  et les plus intelligentes sur le plan émotionnel, plutôt que le nombre de diplômes dont on fait étalage.