Africa-Press – Mauritius. We have all been guilty of repeating ad nauseam the anecdote of Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences, James Meade. The latter wrongly predicted a dismal future for Mauritius because of our vulnerabilities to weather, price shocks and lack of job opportunities outside the sugar sector.
Time and again, we pride ourselves in dismantling the assertions of V. S. Naipaul, yet another Nobel Prize Winner who described Mauritius as a “a stinky hell-hole” in his 1972 work, The Overcrowded Barracoon.
Our rhetoric, however, more often than not stems from the justified pride we derive from an incomparable ability to take right decisions and ride on waves of ingenious ideas to make the most of arising opportunities. And that of transforming challenges into new business ventures and leveraging on our key asset, namely our human capital.
Indeed, over the years, the economic landscape of Mauritius has changed with ample diversification, crafting strategies and bringing new business to our shores to broaden the economic space and ensure better resilience to external shocks.
As a country that has already completed the development cycle, with services, today, being the main driver of the economy, Mauritius needs more of this spirit of inventiveness that has characterized our ascent into one of the most successful countries in the region.
The objective is to bring innovation across all sectors, to create its knowledge based economy, boost its productivity and unleash the potential of such business and industrial trends like nuclear medicine, Internet of Things, Blockchain, Fintech, RegTech, InsurTech, among others.
Therein lies our panacea to move up from an upper middle income economy to a high income economy. However, on their own, good intentions and discourses without concrete actions and instruments, will not suffice in bringing the required paradigm shifts.
This is why we have set the base through several incentives to create the adequate business climate to attract innovative projects and endeavours. For example, there is the Innovation Box, the plug and play cloud system, the rationalization of research and innovation grants, the National Incubator Scheme and the Innovator Occupation permit amongst others.
These incentives are add-ons to that one bold measure announced in the 2016-2017 national budget that has spurred a new era of unprecedented state-of-the art innovation in Mauritius, the Regulatory Sandbox License (RSL).
Numerous countries have tried all sorts of policies to promote and support innovation through national innovation systems, accelerators, and incubators.
But they have failed to attract and lock major projects due to legislations failing to follow the pace of dynamic and fast moving technologies. The idea behind the RSL has been exactly to create an innovative regulatory framework.
It balances risks and prospects and takes an opportunity based approach rather than a permission based one to be able to capture innovative projects. From Day 1, the RSL has been a game-changer in terms of attracting investment.
As a tiny piece of law, the RSL has completely incentivized innovation in the Mauritius investment landscape. Although Sandboxes have cropped up in almost every jurisdictions worldwide, ours is unique in the sense that it caters for all types of projects in all sectors of activity, and not only in Fintech.
For unlearned opponents to innovation, the RSL is a dangerous tool that captures all projects with high risks. In reality, the RSL is a tool that provides Mauritius with an agile way of creating tailor-made legislations for unforeseen innovative projects.
It sets the right safeguards and monitoring requirements to ensure the protection of the consumers and sovereign reputation of the country. The RSL, in fact, is a potent solution to position Mauritius as a regional innovation hub.
As Africa’s middle class population booms, demand for insurance, banking and communication will increase drastically. Africa stands out with lack of supportive regulatory capability.
Mauritius stands a unique chance to leverage on its political stability, strong financial sector and numerous DTA and IPPA to become the techno-service provider to the continent.
The aim and vision is good but implementation may not have been that simple. The RSL has to date already unlocked a number of projects and intrinsically improved niche sectors.
The first issued RSL related to the structuring of a peer to peer crowdlending project. This project incentivizes and mops use of dormant capital into productive projects at the choice of lenders.
It offers opportunity for Mauritius to lead in micro financing onto the African Continent and the spurring of Mauritian technology providers in crowdlending.
This project will also support the small and medium-sized enterprises backbone. It will facilitate access to finance and improve visibility of the projects. The Mauritian RSL, as I have said, is also reflective of our unique identity, and embraces diversity.
New opportunities in the life sciences sector have been unlocked, including the manufacturing of patient specific autoregenic cells that can be used to effectively support delicate surgery for such issues like tetraplegia and quadriplegia.
Today, the Board of Investment (BoI) has reached a new milestone as it has ratified two new projects linked to the facilitation of financing of key innovative applications through sale of membership tokens.
The first is a Blockchain-Backed Loan Platform, facilitating loans collateralized by bitcoin or any other reputed cryptocurrencies. the second is a blockchain backed digital identity wallet. The task that is being accomplished is monumental.
As the BOI structured the RSL, the organization adopted a new approach to projects where it plays the role of a technical project or sector designer as well as a facilitator working in close collaboration with the Board to achieve its objectives.
Indeed, the RSL requires everyone involved to play a strong lead in assessing new trends, understand the intrinsic technologies, propose amendments to project proposals and draft tailor-made rules and regulations on clear understanding on all the aspects of the project.
Through this built synergy, we can today move into new fields and even dream of one day becoming the pioneer and the most robust regional crypto FDI receiver and provider. The worst thing that we could have done is to maintain the status quo and simmer in averageness.
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