Avinash Meetoo

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Leaving the UNDP after two fruitful years

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This Friday 28th of April is my last day at UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles.

After two years, I am leaving the country office where I have very much enjoyed my time as Head of Experimentation in the Accelerator Lab working with two wonderful friends and colleagues: Melany Poorun-Sooprayen and Ayooshee Dookhee. I am thankful for everything we have done together.

During the two years, I have worked on a number of experiments, with my colleagues and implementing partners, which are now completed:

  • Using dried palm leaves to curb soil erosion in Seychelles with TRASS and SPGA,
  • A Financial Literacy experiment to test the use of video content in Kreol for women entrepreneurs in MSMEs in Mauritius and Rodrigues with UoM and UTM,
  • Recruiting and deploying UN Volunteers in Mauritius, Rodrigues and Seychelles for data Collection,
  • The creation of a GRassroot Innovation Database (GRID).

I also participated in two missions abroad:

  • 17-20 February 2021: A mission to Rodrigues where we had working sessions with the Chairperson and Clerk of the Rodrigues Regional Assembly, the Tourism Commission, the Family Commission, MRIC, SME Mauritius and several entrepreneurs,
  • 28 August – 3 September 2022: An Accelerator Lab Retreat at Addis-Ababa in Ethiopia where I had the opportunity to engage with my Acc Lab colleagues from all over the African continent and from New York headquarters to reflect on ways to make UNDP more effective by adding a Research & Development component in each country office.

I also had the opportunity to be in major events which were initiated by the Accelerator Lab:

  • 21 April 2021: Official launch of the UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab,
  • 17 June 2021: A first Collective Intelligence exercise to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of small business owners, especially those operating in the tourism sector,
  • 16 December 2021: A dialogue on COVID-19 and Tourism and Mapping the Way Forward organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism,
  • 24 February 2022 A Youth in Tourism Dialogue in Mauritius with young people being trained for the jobs in the tourism sector; we wanted to know how they felt about the future,
  • 22 April 2022: A similar Youth in Tourism Dialogue in Seychelles,
  • 29 November 2022: The co-design of profiles, with actors in the Agri Business sector, as a means to incite more young people to contribute towards food security,
  • 13-14 December 2022: The Acc Lab organized a workshop with the National Women Entrepreneur Council on Agri Business. This workshop was attended by more than 100 women entrepreneurs from all over the country.
Intervening from Mauritius during a Youth in Tourism Dialogue in Seychelles

From 2-13 December 2022, Ahunna Eziakonwa, the UNDP Regional Director for the Regional Bureau for Africa was in Mauritius on official mission. She launched, inter alia, the SDG Investor Map and engaged with Mauritian women entrepreneurs during an interactive session on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). During a staff lunch, Ahunna shared her life (and work) philosophy with us and it was enlightening.

Since joining UNDP, I had many meetings with local and regional partners such as the Australian High Commissioner (on renewable energy), the Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation, the Ministry of Public Service, Administrative and Institutional Reforms, the Ministry of Tourism, the Mauritius Research and Innovation Council (with whom we signed an MoU on 7 February 2022), the Association of Hoteliers and Restaurants in Mauritius (AHRIM), Business Mauritius, SME Mauritius, the National Institute of Science Technology and Innovation (NISTI) of Seychelles, the Seychelles’ Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust (SeyCCAT) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

Being in an international organization also gave me the opportunity to engage with colleagues from all over the world. In addition to our weekly Acc Lab call (with hundreds of participants from Algeria to Zimbabwe), we had one-on-one meetings with Acc Lab colleagues from countries as diverse as Barbados, Cape Verde, Kenya, Namibia and Rwanda. I liked attending the online RBA Townhall Meetings where Ahunna Eziakonwa was always inspiring as well as the Townhall Meetings with the Administrator where Achim Steiner was always extremely sharp and strategic in his approach.

Ayooshee, Avinash and Melany: the Mauritius and Seychelles Acc Lab team

I also extensively benefited from online talks with very interesting people from international institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Digital Public Goods Alliance, not to mention my UNDP colleagues from the Digital Office, the SDG Integration Group and UNDP Futures.

As a UN and UNDP staff, I also had to follow training courses where I learned a lot. These include BSAFE Security Awareness Training, Fraud & Corruption Awareness & Prevention, Ethics & Integrity at UNDP, Prevention of Harassment, Sexual Harassment & Abuse of Authority, Prevention of Sexual Exploitation & Abuse of the Local Population, Procurement Level 1 Certification, Greening the Blue, The Gender Journey, the UNDP Legal Framework and the UN Human Rights & Responsibilities.

During the two years, I was also the Digital Advocate for the country office with the responsibility to disseminate the UNDP Digital Strategy to my UNDP colleagues as well as our Mauritius and Seychelles partners. I had excellent interactions with colleagues from the Digital Office at UNDP headquarters.

I also made presentations in a number of high-level conferences in Mauritius:

  • 4 September 2021: “Artificial Intelligence Strategy for Mauritius” at the Université des Mascareignes.
  • 12 October 2021: Presentation on the UNDP Offer during a workshop on the Sandbox Framework organized by the Ministry of Public Service and Institutional Reforms.
  • 21 October 2021: Moderation of a high-level panel during the UoM Innovation Week organized by the Mauritius Research and Innovation Council.
  • 27 April 2022: TED-style talk on the UNDP Offer during the “Assises de la Recherche et de l’Innovation” by the Mauritius Research and Innovation Council.
  • 7 November 2022: Keynote speech on “SDGs and Innovation for the Educational Technologies sector in Mauritius” during the UoM Research Week.
  • 23 November 2022: “A Brief History of Programming” at the Developer Conference 2022.
  • 30 November 2022: “Achieving our 2030 Development Targets” at the “Road to Net Zero Conference” at the University of Technology.
  • 7 December 2022: “Robotique et IA à Maurice: Historique, État des lieux et Challenges” at the Université des Mascareignes.
  • 3 March 2023: Interview on ChatGPT during the by MBC Journal Télévisé of 19:30. I explained how ChatGPT works and what Mauritius needs to do to better leverage Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
A presentation on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Robotics at UDM

After two years, it is time for me to leave in order to explore other avenues.

I am an independent thinker again. I am my own boss and I can dictate my own agenda. I am very much interested with the intersection between technology, innovation and policy-making to foster a healthier, wealthier, greener and more inclusive society.

As a technologist, an innovator and an entrepreneur, I am taking a few months sabbatical to pause and reflect on the future.

Thank you everyone, keep it up and see you.

Thirty women entrepreneurs of Mauritius and Rodrigues help us devise an optimal way to become financially literate

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(Women entrepreneurs participating in a Financial Literacy experiment. Photo: UNDP.)

On Saturday 11 February 2023, more than thirty women entrepreneurs of Mauritius converged towards the University of Mauritius to join a financially literacy experiment devised by the UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab.

A little more than one year ago, the UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles organised a collective intelligence exercise with women entrepreneurs from the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) of Mauritius and Rodrigues. We discovered that one of their major concerns was that many of the women entrepreneurs felt that they did not have a good understand of finance. As such, many were struggling to remain compliant with institutions such as the Mauritius Revenue Authority and, in general, making sound financial decisions for their respective private companies.

After discussing with my Accelerator Lab colleagues, I proposed to run an experiment to test the following hypothesis: that any women entrepreneurs of Mauritius and Seychelles, with or without any prior knowledge of finance, could learn basic finance through short videos in Mauritian Creole and participation in a peer-to-peer online learning platform.
It took some time to procure a service provider with proven experience in finance, in the creation of educational videos and in engagement with women entrepreneurs in small businesses. At the end, a team from the University of Mauritius was selected. Partners for this experiment include SME Mauritius and the Mauritius Women Entrepreneurs Council who agreed share part of their extensive database of women entrepreneurs of Mauritius and Rodrigues with UNDP.

First meeting with the university professors

(UNDP Accelerator Lab and university academics. Source: UNDP.)

Our first meeting with the team of academics which had been selected took place on Thursday 20 October 2022. Professor Boopen Seetanah, Dr Goonesh Bahadur and Dr Viraiyan Teeroovengadum from the University of Mauritius were present as well as all three heads of the Accelerator Lab and our three UN Community Volunteers from Mauritius and Rodrigues.

We spoke about our expectations and the various deliverables and their deadlines. We focused on the content and ownership of the videos to be produced. During the conversation, we came up with a tentative list of topics to be covered including financial management, financial reporting and financial analysis. We also chose other topics such as working capital management and pricing.

Of course, we knew that it would be better to ask actual women entrepreneurs to tell us what they really require as new knowledge. Therefore, we decided to constitute several focus groups consisting of both established and beginner women entrepreneurs. In this way, we thought that the topics would be useful for a more varied audience.

Women entrepreneurs help identify the topics to cover

(A focus group meeting. Source: UoM.)

The team from the University of Mauritius met with different groups of women entrepreneurs over a period of two weeks and, from their interaction, came up with the following list of topics to be covered during the training:

  • Understanding the Business Cycle
  • Understanding Financial Statements
  • Financial Statements Analysis
  • Working Capital Management
  • Budgeting and Investment Appraisal
  • Costing and Cost Classification
  • Statutory Compliance

From there, the university team wrote the script for the videos, identified the people who would speak, designed the images, charts and animations to be used and embarked on the video recording and editing process.

We had earmarked one month but this took three times more as there was always an aspect of the videos to fine-tune. The videos were finally ready at the end of January 2023 and the University of Mauritius team transferred the ownership to UNDP. Even though the experiment had been delayed the experiment by additional weeks, this was time well spent as, at the end, UNDP had about 12 videos of about 10 minutes each on finance literacy, all uploaded on a specific Youtube channel.

Thirty women entrepreneurs join the financial literacy experiment

(Engaging with 30 women entrepreneurs for the Financial Literacy experiment. Source: UNDP.)

On Saturday 11 February 2022, more than 30 women entrepreneurs went to the University of Mauritius for a first face-to-face meeting with the UNDP Accelerator Lab and the University of Mauritius teams. The entrepreneurs were very enthusiastic to have been contacted by the academics and were really keen to understand how the experiment would be conducted and what they were expected to achieve at the end.

Avinash Meetoo and Ayooshee Dookhee from the UNDP Accelerator Lab explained why the experiment was conceived, how, should the women entrepreneurs prove the experiment to be successful, this mode of learning could be deployed on a wider basis across the country, etc. The academics explained that, on that day, the women entrepreneurs would undergo a baseline test to evaluate their existing level of financial literacy.

The academics then explained that, during the subsequent two months, the women entrepreneurs would learn about financial literacy by watching the YouTube videos at their own pace. Of course, the women would be able to pause, rewind and watch the videos as many times as they wanted. They would also be in online forums where they would be able to interact with their fellow learners as well as the academics.

The academics finally explained that the women entrepreneurs would do a final evaluation at the end of the two-months period in order to verify whether this novel mode of learning through videos in Mauritian Creole was successful or not. All women entrepreneurs would also obtain a certificate of completion at the end of the experiment.

(Avinash Meetoo and Ayooshee Dookhee from the UNDP Accelerator Lab with two university professors. Photo: UNDP.)

The next steps

There is one month left for the experiment. Up to now, user engagement has been good and there is a lot of interaction online, especially in a WhatsApp group with all the women entrepreneurs and the academics. WhatsApp has proved to be more practical that other kinds of communication tools.

The experiment will conclude by mid-April with a final report to be submitted by the University of Mauritius team and an award ceremony for the thirty participants.

Watch this space!

(This blog was written with the contributions of Dr Boopen Seetanah, Professor of International Trade, Finance and Development Economics at the University of Mauritius, Dr Kesseven Padachi, Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Technology Mauritius, Dr Goonesh Bahadur, Senior Lecturer and Officer in Charge of hte Centre for Innovative Lifelong Learning (CILL) at the University of Mauritius and Dr Viraiyan Teeroovengadum, Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Mauritius. Many thanks also to Ayooshee Dookhee and Melany Poorun-Sooprayen, my two colleagues of the UNDP Accelerator Lab. Finally, I would also like to thank our three UNVs: Shabbir Ismael, Medaavi Gopaul and Jean-Wendy Gaspard.)

If you’re interested to partner with the UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles Accelerator Lab for this experiment or any other project, please reach out to us at

(Engaging with 30 women entrepreneurs for the Financial Literacy experiment. Source: UNDP.)

My interview on ChatGPT during the 19:30 Journal Télévisé of the MBC

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On 3 March 2023, I was interviewed by MBC during the 19:30 Journal Télévisé. I spoke about what the ChatGPT chatbot is, how it has been built and with what kind of data it has been trained.

I also spoke about why, from a strategic perspective, it is important for Mauritius to have people who understand Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in order to propel the country even further.