The current African Development Bank’s Country Strategy Paper for Mauritius is for the period 2004 - 2008. The design of the assistance strategy was underpinned by Mauritius’ Economic Agenda for the New Millennium (2001-2005)” whose main objective was to further diversify Mauritius into a high-tech, high income, services and knowledge economy.
Mauritius has been transformed from a poor, state dominated and a mono-crop economy, entirely dependent on sugar, into a private sector led upper-middle income country, built around four pillars, namely sugar, tourism, economic processing zones (EPZ) and financial services, particularly in offshore enterprises. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now been added as the fifth pillar of development. The country has successfully sustained its high economic growth and  macroeconomic aggregates remain relatively sound. Savings and investment rates remain high. The performance of the external sector has also been strong. The relatively high unemployment rate requires close attention.

The main challenge facing Mauritius today is how to adapt to trade liberalization and globalization processes, which are bringing in fierce competition. Limited future opportunities for preferential trade arrangements also pose serious constraints. Medium-term prospects are, however, encouraging. To meet these challenges, Mauritius has embarked on an ambitious development strategy to find new drivers for economic growth. In this regard, measures have been undertaken to modernize the sugar industry and EPZs to ensure higher productivity. The country is also re-engineering itself to move up the value chain and build a knowledge economy based on financial services and ICT.

Development Policy

To address these challenges, the government development agenda focuses on the following issues:

• Improvement in the competitiveness of the private sector
• Investment in people and society (mainly education reform)
• Preservation of the fragile environment
• Improvement in economic management
• The development of Mauritius into a Cyber Island, thus making ICT a fifth pillar of the economy.

The government is also continuing with the implementation of sound macro-economic and structural policies and has initiated a change to the Medium Term Expenditure Framework budgeting system.  

Bank Group Strategy

The AfDB Assistance Strategy for Mauritius during the period 2004-2008 was three pronged and comprised:

• Promotion of private sector development, including ICT development;
• Support for infrastructure development, essential for the diversification and re-engineering processes, aimed at strengthening Mauritius’ competitive edge and efficient functioning of the private sector; and
• Non-lending activities, focusing on economic and sector work (ESW).

Public sector lending for infrastructure development was targeted at two main sectors, namely; agriculture (irrigation infrastructure) and transport. Promoting the Bank’s private sector facilities to the country's entrepreneurs was intensified during the period to enable it identify viable private sector operations, including those in ICT sector. Non-lending activities had to focus on ESW. This had to complement activities of other development partners in the country such as India, the EU, UNDP and the World Bank.