The Mauritian government defines the diaspora as a Mauritian citizen holding a valid Mauritian passport, or a child or grandchild of such a citizen, whether or not they hold a Mauritian passport, as specified in the Constitution of Mauritius and confirmed in the EU-Mauritius Diaspora for Development country profile. This definition is deliberately broad, intended to capture not only first-generation emigrants but the extended network of their descendants who maintain some connection to the island. The practical implication of the definition is that the Mauritian diaspora pool is significantly larger than the 3,500 annual departures would suggest: it encompasses decades of cumulative emigration and two subsequent generations of descendants in Europe and Australia who retain legal eligibility for the diaspora schemes the government has established. The dividend this article examines is the gap between the potential scale of that pool and the actual engagement the existing mechanisms have produced.

Article 9 of this edition documented the structural condition that drives emigration from Mauritius: the labour market architecture of a rent economy that requires low-skill workers at the hospitality base and imports high-skill professionals at the service sector apex, leaving a mid-tier professional vacancy that the graduate population is trained to fill but the domestic economy has not built. The 3,500 Mauritians who leave annually are disproportionately concentrated in the graduate segment of the labour force, as the migration literature on small island developing states consistently finds for economies with significant tertiary education investment and limited mid-tier professional employment capacity. Each departure represents approximately twelve to eighteen years of public educational investment: primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling that the Mauritian state financed and the destination economy's labour market absorbs without having paid for the formation.

The cumulative stock of this departure is the diaspora. Mauritius has been generating skilled emigration at scale since the post-independence period. The diaspora communities in the United Kingdom, primarily in London, Birmingham, and the south-east of England; in France, primarily in Paris and Lyon; and in Australia, primarily in Melbourne and Sydney, represent the accumulated human capital of several decades of public educational investment that found its professional expression outside the island. The Afrobarometer survey of December 2024 found that 74 per cent of Mauritians aged 18 to 24 had considered emigrating, and that this share had more than doubled since the 2016 equivalent survey. The pipeline of future diaspora members is expanding at the same time that the existing diaspora's economic integration in destination countries deepens their roots and attenuates their connection to Mauritius.

Remittances to Mauritius received in 2023 stood at 1.94 per cent of GDP, according to World Bank World Development Indicators data. This is a decline from 2.12 per cent in 2022. The world average for personal remittances received as a share of GDP, across 174 countries, stands at 5.13 per cent, according to the same World Bank dataset. Mauritius receives remittances at 38 per cent of the world average for its income level and development status. The gap is not explained by the absence of a diaspora: 3,500 people emigrating annually from an island of 1.27 million people is a significant emigration rate relative to population. It is not explained by transfer cost barriers in the formal system: the Bank of Mauritius confirms that Mauritius is already compliant with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Target 10.c.1, requiring remittance transfer costs of less than 3 per cent, a standard that most of the world has not yet achieved. The gap is explained by the nature of what the diaspora sends and what the engagement mechanisms have been designed to capture.

The remittances that flow through formal banking channels are predominantly personal transfers: money sent to family members for household consumption. These are captured in the World Bank statistics. What the statistics do not capture, because the mechanisms do not exist at sufficient scale to generate the flows, is diaspora investment: capital channelled from the diaspora into productive enterprise in Mauritius, diaspora bond subscriptions, diaspora pension or savings vehicles denominated in rupees and invested in Mauritian assets, or organised diaspora professional return programmes that bring qualified individuals back to fill the mid-tier professional roles the economy cannot generate domestically. The 1.94 per cent of GDP in remittances is largely consumption transfer. The investment transfer is negligible because the instruments to generate it have not been built at scale.

The Mauritius Diaspora Scheme, as documented in the EU-Mauritius Diaspora for Development country profile published by the diasporafordevelopment.eu initiative, is described as "an ambitious attempt to create a simplified, single point of entry for diaspora engagement." It provides incentives for permanent diaspora return, including tax advantages, and was designed to consolidate the previous Mauritius Diaspora Research Funding Scheme, which had been established specifically to bring diaspora experts to the island to stimulate research or teaching programmes. The MDRFS had disappointing uptake. The consolidated scheme has aimed to make diaspora engagement more sustainable by providing a comprehensive framework rather than a targeted programme. The results, according to the same EU assessment, remain limited, with the scheme failing to generate the scale of diaspora investment and skills transfer that the policy design intended.

The structural reasons for the underperformance are the same structural conditions that drive emigration in the first place. A diaspora professional considering a return engagement is making a calculation about the professional environment they would return to: the salary level, the quality of institutional infrastructure, the availability of peers and collaborators, and the professional advancement that return would make possible relative to remaining abroad. The Mauritius that generates the 74 per cent emigration intention among its youth is not automatically the Mauritius that makes return economically rational for the professionals who have already left. Tax incentives applied to a structural mismatch between the economy's professional capacity and the diaspora's professional ambition do not close the gap that drives emigration. They reduce the cost of return without addressing the reason it was not happening.

Jamaica and Cabo Verde represent the comparator cases most frequently cited in the academic literature on small island diaspora mobilisation. Jamaica's diaspora, primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States, generates remittances that reached approximately 21 per cent of GDP in 2023, according to World Bank data: eleven times the Mauritius ratio. The Jamaican diaspora's financial engagement with the home economy is sustained by a combination of family ties that remain more immediate across the shorter geographic and cultural distance, a diaspora investment programme that has channelled diaspora capital into productive enterprise through dedicated instruments, and a historical pattern of circular migration that maintains closer economic ties between the diaspora and the island economy. The structural conditions differ from Mauritius: the Jamaican diaspora is larger relative to the population, the English-language connection to the UK destination market is more direct, and the cultural distance between diaspora community and island is maintained differently.

Cabo Verde, a small Atlantic archipelago with a population of approximately 570,000 and an extensive diaspora in Portugal, the United States, and the Netherlands, generates remittances of approximately 14 per cent of GDP. The Cabo Verde model has been studied extensively by the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration precisely because of the scale of diaspora financial engagement relative to island size. The key feature of the Cabo Verde model is not a government programme but a structural characteristic: the diaspora maintains stronger economic dependency on the home economy because a larger share of household income in Cabo Verde derives from diaspora remittances, creating a circular economic relationship that sustains the transfer. In Mauritius, where average monthly wages are Rs 43,488 and the families of diaspora members are not in the extreme poverty conditions that maximise remittance motivation, the circular dependency is weaker and the engagement correspondingly lower.

If Mauritius received remittances at the world average of 5.13 per cent of GDP rather than its current 1.94 per cent, the additional flow at the 2024 GDP level of $16.36 billion would represent approximately $513 million per year: larger than the total tourism receipts for several months, larger than the entire offshore sector's GDP contribution, and potentially larger than the current account deficit that has been running since 1986. This is an illustrative calculation, not a policy target, because the structural conditions that produce the world average vary enormously across countries and the Mauritius diaspora's specific characteristics, its geographic distribution, its professional profile, its generational depth, and its economic ties to the island, determine what is actually achievable rather than what the average arithmetic suggests.

What the calculation illustrates is the order of magnitude of what is being left uncollected. The diaspora engagement gap is not a marginal resource. It is a structural under-utilisation of the most specific asset that Mauritius has built and then exported: the professional human capital formed by its own educational investment and deployed in the economies of its former colonial metropole and its emigration destinations. Diaspora bonds, diaspora investment vehicles, structured skills transfer programmes, return incentive packages calibrated to the professional opportunity cost of the diaspora member rather than to the average rupee wage, and bilateral social security arrangements that reduce the pension cost of return are all instruments that comparator SIDS have deployed with varying success. Mauritius has tried some of them at insufficient scale. The underperformance is documented in its own government's assessment.