Avinash Meetoo

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Education

Financial literacy: an experiment to empower women entrepreneurs of Mauritius and Rodrigues

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Woman entrepreneur and hydroponic farmer in Mauritius

Women entrepreneurs are contributing greatly to the resilience of the country and there are good reasons to believe that they could contribute even more. The UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab plans to test the hypothesis that women, irrespective of their knowledge of finance, can run their businesses better after accessing financial literacy material.

The collective intelligence exercise organised by the lab on 17 June 2021 revealed that one of the biggest concerns of owners of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Mauritius and Rodrigues was a lack of financial literacy. Establishing and operating a business involves complex financial and administrative operations, and many small business owners struggle with documents that require some knowledge of accounting or finance. As a result, small enterprises tend to operate in a “financial fog”, struggle with procedures, and are susceptible to making irrational decisions.

Experimenting self-paced financial literacy training for women-led MSMEs

Many of the small businesses in Mauritius and Rodrigues are operated by women. In some cases, these women entrepreneurs have a limited knowledge of finance. Improving the financial literacy of these women entrepreneurs is undoubtedly critical for enhancing the viability of their businesses. While formal training, to which enterprises already contribute a training levy to the Human Resource Development Council, could be a solution, small businesses encounter difficulties releasing their limited staff to full-time sessions. For women, this kind of training is also impeded by domestic responsibilities such as child care. Another factor playing against formal training is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has made face-to-face training practically impossible.

The UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab considers that self-paced online training on financial literacy could enable MSME owners to improve the management of their businesses more efficiently. Through simple online videos delivered in Mauritian Creole on precise finance topics, and an online forum to facilitate peer-to-peer learning, many Mauritian women entrepreneurs could benefit from a more flexible solution towards improving their financial knowledge.

The Accelerator Lab plans to explore and test the efficiency of this self-paced online training solution with the participation of 15 women entrepreneurs from Mauritius and Rodrigues. This experiment, to be held with the collaboration of an educational institution and tax and business authorities, will include 15 women entrepreneurs from Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) of Mauritius and Rodrigues.

The proposed experiment will require the following:

  • A person who is responsible for making financial decisions in a women-led MSME (typically, the owner) performs an initial Financial Literacy test online.
  • The person then has access, for a duration of three months, to short videos delivered in Mauritian Creole on various financial aspect of running a business.
  • During this period, all trainees will have the possibility to interact through an online learning platform, as a means towards peer-to-peer learning.
  • At the end of the three months, the person undergoes a similar test as at the beginning to evaluate her progress.

The Accelerator Lab wants to demonstrate that these women will be better equipped to run a profitable business as they would have acquired new knowledge and skills in finance.

We believe that MSMEs, with leaders who have a better grasp of finance, have a better chance of succeeding and, therefore, contribute to the development of the country. Such MSMEs also can create more jobs which is desirable in this COVID-19 context.

The next step

After consultations with potential stakeholders, including women entrepreneurs, the Accelerator Lab is in the process of identifying a partner to run this experiment during the first quarter of 2022.

The partner will be responsible to conduct the tests and create the multimedia content as well as provide the online learning platform. It will have to ensure that the videos created are straightforward to understand and really useful to small business owners. In other words, this experiment is not an academic experiment but rather an opportunity for women entrepreneurs to better run their companies and thus attain new heights. With 52% of its population being women, the Republic of Mauritius has all to gain by empowering its women entrepreneurs.

Women MSME owners who would like to be considered for this experiment, can contact the Accelerator Lab team. Individuals, public or private organisations willing to partner with UNDP to conduct this experiment are also encouraged to contact the team.

Building a GRassroot Innovation Database (GRID) for Seychelles, Mauritius and Rodrigues

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The problems that human societies will face in the future will be complex, and it will take the very best minds, working as a collective, to solve them. The GRassroot Innovation Database (GRID), which is being built by the UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab, will include the Seychellois, Mauritian and Rodriguan innovators and the grassroot solutions they have worked on over the years. Through this initiative, innovators from our islands will be brought to the forefront and their solutions upscaled to the national and regional levels.

As a United Nations Agency, the UNDP supports countries towards achieving the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The vision behind is to promote prosperity for all but not at the expense of the planet and of our collective future. However, protecting the planet and people presents unique challenges. Furthermore, we are today facing unprecedented issues such as the dramatic effects of COVID-19 and climate change. To sustainably manage these threats which are quickly shaping the new normal, recipes of the past will unfortunately not work. It is thus time to think differently and this implies to work with and learn from each other.

Getting grassroots innovators on board

Today, it has become clear that top-down approaches (including solutions coming from “elsewhere” imposed on local populations) oftentimes fail as they are not really adapted to local specificities. Lessons learnt also shown that inclusive approaches are more efficient to address difficulties faced by the population. In our modern times, this involves getting everyone with innovative ideas and solutions on board towards achieving the SDGs. Missing this essential component would be tragic.

The main aim of the Accelerator Lab is to strengthen UNDP’s relationship with the grassroot communities and know more about their approaches to daily problems. Learning from these grassroot innovators, will allow the Lab to support the UNDP country office in better conceptualizing projects and proposals together. This collective approach will also contribute to improve the solutions proposed to the citizens of Mauritius, Rodrigues and Seychelles.

A GRassroot Innovation Database to democratize access to solutions

Inspired by the Indian GRID, created by Professor Anil Gupta of the Honey Bee Network and UNDP India, the UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab has embarked on a mission to build a database of innovators and grassroots innovations. This database, which will be built in collaboration with numerous partners, is meant to be user-friendly, searchable and useful for different audiences: international organizations, other funding agencies, government bodies, the private sector, incubators, and civil society.

Designed to be open and free to use, the GRID will allow easy access to a plethora of innovative solutions pertaining to women empowerment, economic growth, circular economy, sustainable natural resource management, livelihood generation, etc. Through the GRID, the works of innovators will benefit from additional support and many of them will be upscaled across the nation and beyond. It is also expected that the Governments of Mauritius and Seychelles use the GRID to determine who to engage with and what initiatives to support in the interest of the population.

The UNDP Accelerator Lab is preparing for a massive data collection exercise and ten UN Community Volunteers are on the way to help in these important tasks. The GRID will not be limited to textual information but will be a rich multimedia database with audio recordings, photos and videos. The data entered will be properly validated thorough cross-checking while outdated or irrelevant data will be purged regularly.

The protection of intellectual property is another essential aspect of the GRID. The publication of information will indefectibly require the authorization of their owners, in line with existing legislations such as the Data Protection Act of the Republic of Mauritius.

Innovation is key to the future

We have come to a period of human history where most simple problems have been solved and we now have to face the complex ones. Making sure that people of Seychelles, Mauritius and Rodrigues can strive without further affecting our planet and depleting our natural resources is a complicated task. In the face of such challenges, our Small Island Developing States cannot afford to miss out on the best minds they have. Therefore, the GRID is an important step towards bringing grassroot innovators to the table.

We envision a near future where decision makers will have direct lines of communication with innovators; a future where it would be easy to identify the real experts in different fields. This will allow various entities, including the United Nations, governments, private structures, and NGOs, to leverage on the very best minds which our countries can offer.

And, when the very best minds work together, the sky is the limit.

Mauritius becoming a Knowledge Society

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Google is 23 years old today: the company started in 1998, the year Christina and I were finishing our studies in France.

Within a few years, Google would perfect its search engine and create all the novel products it is known for today (Android, Gmail, etc). I do not know much about the way the company works and, maybe, this is one of the few things I regret. I was interviewed by Google in April 2007 but I was not offered a job there. I wonder how my life would have been different if I had obtained the job. Or, in March 2008, when I was offered a job in San Francisco by a consulting company but I had to decline because of the infamous Global Financial Crisis then.

Anyway, for the past 23 years, Christina have been in Mauritius. And we are very happy to have lived this quarter of a century here. We have had two wonderful kids who are big enough to fare for themselves now (and they are not spoilt) and we have managed, over the years, to forge formidable memories with family and friends (and these memories are preserved thanks to public photos and private videos).

In many ways, the world we live in today, where I can easily speak to my daughter in France every day, is one imagined by the founders of companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. They dreamt of an always connected world and we are living in one now.

I also need to pay tribute to all the UNIX and Linux geeks in the world. Thanks to them and over open-source software developers all over the world, software works. Most of the formidable things we admire today (think Tesla cars or the datacenters of Google or Amazon) are powered by Linux and open-source software. Apple is also a major user of open-source software, most notably BSD and Mach for its operating system, macOS.

Of course, not everything is rosy for the Mauritian population. Some people are still on the other side of the digital divide and some still do not know how to use technology for enriching their lives. And, to be blunt, some use technology to (try to) keep people in the dark ages…

But one thing I have been thinking about for a long time now is to use the existing technology infrastructure in Mauritius (the fibre, the Internet and the myriad of online services provided by companies such as Google), to transform the country into a Knowledge Country, not only a Knowledge Economy.

I think that our people are sophisticated enough to form part of a Knowledge Society.

What do you think? What does a Knowledge Society looks like? How can we create one? How can we reach enlightenment?