Mauritius: Smart City Pioneer

Driven by a willingness to embrace new technologies, Mauritius strives to become an innovation leader that promotes and pursues urban development solutions for the 21st century.

Often dubbed ‘Singapore of Africa’, Mauritius is focusing on cultivating a vibrant and conducive technology cluster, with the aim of transforming itself into a smart island. The country is embarking on a number of mega infrastructure projects including the roll-out of smart and cyber cities as well as new techno parks. The smart cities are envisaged to leverage the latest advances in urban planning and digitalised technologies. With a total investment estimated at €3.6 billion, Mauritius is looking for local and global partners that are keen to help realise this vision and cash in on the global smart city market, which is estimated to be worth $1.56 trillion in 2020.

Smart City Scheme

The government has specifically set up a scheme called the Smart City Scheme (SCS) to provide a framework as well as many fiscal and non-fiscal incentives to investors for the development of smart cities across the island. There are currently 12 projects in the pipeline, with some of Mauritius’ largest corporations backing the idea. The Omnicane airport city, Azuri Smart City, Medine Integrated Park, St Felix Village, Roche Noires Smart City, and the Highlands City are just a few of the smart city projects designed to transform Mauritius into a model global smart country as part of government’s new urban philosophy. The smart cities will be environmentally friendly, generate their own resources in terms of energy and water and provide for stateof-the-art connectivity. These cities will also have smart modern transportation to help reduce traffic congestion across the island. As smart city’s success depends upon collaboration between businesses and devices, Mauritius is seeking to attract companies and know-how in a number of areas such as cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, analytics, visualisation, mobile applications as well as Virtual and Augmented Reality as well as their application in industry, education and edutainment. While the Smart Mauritius Strategy, based on offering ultra-high bandwidth, will surely enhance the ICT sector’s contribution to Mauritius’ GDP and make the country an ICT hub, all smart cities are seen as a catalyst for wider economic development. The aim is to consolidate Mauritius’ global business sector by creating ideal conditions for working, living and spurring investment across economic sectors. All smart cities will be led by a main theme, such as logistics and airport, port related activities, ocean led development, financial services or the knowledge economy.

“For me, the future is clearly in technology, and particularly in start-ups. We are seeking to create a new breed of entrepreneurs in a technology-driven economy. We would like to see more partners involved in research and development because we have a whole slew of engineers and scientists. This is a resource investors can tap into at a reasonable rate.”

Koomaren Chetty, CEO of BPML

Thus far, the most visible manifestation of the island’s push to transform itself into an innovative, sustainable and tech-savvy island was the Cyber City Project set up by Business Parks of Mauritius Ltd (BPML) in 2003. Cyber tower one and cyber tower two are among the most intelligent buildings in Mauritius, offering world-class facilities that are constantly being upgraded and modernised. The smart cities will now add another layer to this concept and provide high-end office space to companies, as well as residential units for their employees. Global laboratories, research organisations and biotechnology companies have already expressed interest in setting up a base in Mauritius. Developments such as these mean that Mauritius’ vision of creating the right environment for sustainable-innovation and providing an experimental R&D playground is well on its way of becoming a reality.