The Developer Journal Issue 3 | Page 10

I N V E S T & d e v e l O P UNICITI: A VISION FOR EDUCATION ON THE WEST COAST OF MAURITIUS The Medine group, a century-old key player in the local sugar industry with a land bank of over 10,000 hectares, launched its Education Village in 2012 in the region of Pierrefonds as part of its diversification strategy. This campus has been designed to host a selective cast of world-class and internationally recognised institutions across different fields of study. The rationale behind setting up such a campus in Mauritius was clearly to provide top-notch higher education for Mauritian students as well as students from the African region and beyond, significantly demonstrating that Mauritius has a lot more to offer than its landscapes and white sandy beaches. The group endeavoured to set education at the heart of Uniciti, its smart city located on the West coast of Mauritius. Based on the live-work-enjoy-learn philosophy, Uniciti is poised to be an integrated and connected city that will promote sustainable development through a knowledge economy, and whose main drivers would be its office park, but also education, and particularly higher education, through an education hub. Uniciti Education Hub has hence been created as the embodiment of a distinctive and comprehensive offer, which blends into one entity, the whole educational offer of Uniciti. While l’Île aux Enfants caters for nursery and preprimary education, Westcoast International Primary and Secondary schools (WIPS & WISS), which are very popular among the South African community in Mauritius, are referenced in terms of primary and secondary education.