Word: mauritius
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hour-long training course is a small but important part of Mauritius' ambitious plans to turn itself into a hub for information and communications technology. The Indian Ocean island boasts one of Africa's most successful economies. Under French and then British control, nearly all available land was given over to growing sugarcane. But after independence in 1968, the government pinned development on diversification, luring Asian textile manufacturers with cheap labor and tax-free exporting zones. In the 1980s the country also invested in tourism and offshore banking. Economic growth has exceeded 5% a year over the past two decades...
...Mauritius markets itself as a "cyber island" to serve the African and South Asian markets, its timing is lousy. It missed the dotcom boom and must compete against more established hubs in Singapore and Malaysia. But opportunities remain. Because both London and Paris ruled the island, many Mauritians speak English and French, making the island an attractive bilingual base for American companies doing business in Africa and Asia. IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have opened regional offices there, and last month work began on a $50 million "cyber city" to attract new software and IT companies. The government promises low taxes...
...Mauritius needs skilled workers. The country has fewer than 3,000 trained IT professionals (out of a population of 1.2 million) and produces just 500 more each year. The government is investing heavily in education, wants to put computers into every school on the island and recently opened a university of technology to churn out IT workers. "But the lack of education is still a massive problem," says Eric Charoux, director of DCDM Business School, Mauritius' largest private university. "There are just not enough students coming through." This dot in the ocean, he says, would welcome techies who lost their...
...openness to new faiths," he writes of the black population of Anguilla. In Belize, "Negroes in jackets and ties?famous throughout Central America for their immunity to disease?walk behind the hearses" and "The Premier is a man of mixed race: Maya Indian, European, some seepage of African." In Mauritius, he insists that the Foreign Minister Gaetan Duval "isn't black. He is a brown-skinned, straight-haired man of forty." Though some of the numerous racial distinctions in this book might be described as old-fashioned, others are less ambiguous?at best patronizing, at worst suggesting quaint inadequacies...
...California Governor Gray Davis signed a law last month requiring automakers to cut their cars' carbon emissions by 2009. Many countries are similarly proactive. Chile is encouraging sustainable use of water and electricity; Japan is dangling financial incentives before consumers who buy environmentally sound cars; and tiny Mauritius is promoting solar cells and discouraging use of plastics and other disposables...