The Board of Directors of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) on Wednesday, February 5 2014 in Tunis approved Mauritius’ Country Strategy Paper (CSP) for 2014-2018. The CSP provides the Bank’s strategic business plan in Mauritius for the five-year period. It is designed to help Mauritius build its competitiveness and resilience to exogenous shocks so as to enhance the quality of growth and accelerate the country’s transition to a High Income Country.
It is aligned to the government’s draft ten-year Economic and Social Transformation Plan (ESTP) and its three-year rolling Program Based Budget (PBB) results framework both designed within the country’s Vision 2020 and anchored on the African Development Bank’s Strategy 2013-2022 focusing on inclusive and green growth.
Taking into account the strategic importance of Mauritius to the region and the Bank, the paper recognizes the country’s outstanding performance and strong economic fundamentals and positive spillover effects through peer learning with countries on the mainland with the Bank playing a crucial catalytic role.
The strategy draws on the Bank’s comparative advantage to support interventions in Mauritius under two complementary pillars: (1) Building Infrastructure and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and (2) Deepening Skills and Technology Development.
Pillar 1 targets policy reform activities aimed at addressing bottlenecks in energy, transport and water and sanitation infrastructure. This would enable Mauritius to improve the quality and capacity of infrastructure so as to attract higher value-added investments, enhance the domestic private sector’s capacity to penetrate the regional market and improve public service delivery.
It would also promote gradual transition to ‘green’ growth by supporting the government, enhance resource use efficiency in the utilities sector, achieve policy clarity on the share of renewable energy in the national production mix, and reduce underground water pollution.
For its part, Pillar 2 focuses on actions and policy reforms that will help improve the quality and relevance of education, particularly higher education and Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET), as well as strengthen human capital. This would enable Mauritius to address the skills gap and enhance the country’s productivity and innovation capacity.
In line with the Bank’s 2013-2022 Strategy and using country presence and the MIC Trust Fund Grant facility, the CSP would deepen the Bank’s technical and knowledge advisory role in Mauritius.
The Bank Group’s active portfolio in Mauritius at end April 2013 amounted to US $678.6 million (UA 442.3 million). The Competitiveness and Public Sector Efficiency Program (CPSE) budget support loan) accounted for 99.74% of the total net commitment. Four MIC Grants in the transport and governance sectors made up the remaining 0.26%.
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