“Without foreign workers, entire sections of our economy would stop”

Adilla Diouman-Mosafeer, Founder of Talent Lab and HR Café

Having lived in Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Botswana, Adilla Diouman-Mosafeer considers herself a “child of Africa” who is at home anywhere on its soil. Her journey has given her a real understanding of the continent’s promises and challenges. For the founder of HR Café and Talent Lab, which has recently opened a branch in Rwanda, Africans can be part of the answer to Mauritius’ labour shortage in some key sectors of the economy at a time when Mauritian youth themselves seek elsewhere the opportunities, work-life balance and true meritocracy they cannot find here. But recruiting abroad without developing our own human capital would, she argues, be a mistake.

To start with, talk to us about how Talent Lab is doing.

Talent Lab has just celebrated its 12th anniversary, and we can say, without pretension, that we figure today among the most solicited human resources management consulting firms on the island, recognized for our mastery of labour law and HR processes. 

As for my little baby, HR Café, it is entering its 5th year and is doing wonderfully. Our 15th edition, on the theme of foreign labour and in partnership with ER Group, saw a record participation. We are already preparing the 16th edition, with MCB, around diversity and inclusion [Editor’s Note: The interview was held before the 16th edition of HR Café]. My gratitude goes to our coffee partner Nespresso, as well as to our photography partner, Focus, for their trust and enthusiasm.

“Whatever the country, African soil is home.”

You have announced an opening in Africa. Why?

We have indeed created Talent Lab International in Rwanda last May and have launched our activities.

I am a child of Africa. Born in Mauritius, I grew up on the continent during a large part of my childhood. My most beautiful memories are buried there. My father had been called to settle in Zimbabwe at the beginning of the 1980s, then in Botswana, as a teacher. Each vacation, we went to discover other countries of the continent.

Today, in what I consider my midlife, the call of return towards continental Africa is stronger than ever, especially since my parents and my elder brother, with whom I lived this African dream, are no longer. For those who do not know Africa and its culture, it can seem heavy, even intimidating, when it comes to setting up a business there. For me, it is a return to my childhood, a place to which I am viscerally linked. Whatever the country, African soil is home. 

Do you envisage other openings in Africa?

Such is indeed the intention. But I believe that one must advance there with discernment and with a clear purpose. Africa is not conquered; it is understood. Each market has its soul, its rhythm, its legal framework, its relational codes. We therefore prefer to build solidly, learn, and take root, before turning our gaze towards a third country. Precipitation is the enemy of anchoring.

Does Africa represent a pool of workers for Mauritius?

100%. It is a considerable reserve of skills and energy. A caveat, however, and it is linguistic: Most African nationals speak only English, and to very variable degrees. Yet Mauritius functions on a bilingual base: English dominates in writing and in administration, but French remains omnipresent in daily exchanges, client relations and a large part of professional life. Not mastering French therefore constitutes a first real obstacle. To this is added, for certain profiles, a level of English itself unequal, which complicates integration into demanding functions. The barrier is not insurmountable, but it strongly conditions the capacity of adaptation on the island.

“We live a double hemorrhage: we lose our brains at the top and we struggle to fill our professions at the bottom.”

That said, their seriousness and their ardor at work command respect. They excel in professions of contact with clientele — hospitality, catering, retail trade — where know-how and constancy count as much as technique. But they also distinguish themselves in construction, agro-industry, personal care, as well as in more qualified functions like finance, accounting, IT… It would be reductive to confine African talent to unskilled labour alone. The continent, today, trains engineers, analysts, and developers of whom Mauritius would have every interest to surround itself.

Which sectors, precisely, and what types of jobs no longer attract Mauritians?

These are, for the most part, the so-called “arduous” or socially little valued professions: construction, manufacturing and textile industry, agriculture, bakery, security, maintenance, part of hospitality and catering… Physically demanding professions, with restrictive schedules, and whose remuneration has not followed the elevation of the standard of living and aspirations. 

It is not a rejection of work. I refute this lazy reading. It is a cultural transformation. A more educated, more mobile generation now refuses conditions that its elders accepted out of necessity. The Mauritian does not flee effort; he flees an effort poorly recognized, poorly paid, devoid of perspective. As long as these professions are not revalued — in salary, but also in dignity and status — they will continue to empty of their local arms.

What do Mauritians look for?

Meaning, stability, balance… The younger generations, in particular, no longer aspire only to a salary: they seek recognition, progression, a healthy work environment and a true respect of their personal life. Their relationship to work has shifted. One no longer wants to devote body and soul to a company that does not give back the same. And when these expectations are not fulfilled here, many look for them elsewhere — in Canada, in Australia, in the United Kingdom. What the Mauritian seeks, deep down, is not so different from what any worker in the world seeks: to be seen, to be valued, to be paid at his fair value. The difference is that today, he has the means to go seek it where it is offered to him. It is a signal that our companies must hear, not judge.

The Minister of Labour, Reza Uteem, has said that the recruitment of foreign workers is a necessity. To what extent is that the case?

It is a structural necessity, and not a conjunctural choice. The minister said it rightly: the recourse to foreign labour is the direct consequence of the aging of our population and the contraction of our active population. Each year, fewer arms enter the labour market than leave it. It is an implacable arithmetic. To this is added the gap between supply and demand — the famous skills mismatch — and the disaffection for certain professions mentioned above. 

Without foreign workers, entire sections of our economy would stop. Construction sites would not be delivered, factories would run at half speed, hotels could not ensure service. The necessity is therefore real, immediate and vital. But — and here I nuance — necessity must never become facility. Resorting to foreigners to fill an urgent need is legitimate; using it to avoid revaluing professions and Mauritians would be a strategic fault. Foreign labour must be a complement, never a substitute to the development of our own human capital.

What percentage of our economy depends on foreign workers?

Let us remain rigorous on the figures, for they sometimes circulate in an approximate way. Official sources give us two solid benchmarks: our active population is around 595,000 to 600,000 people and the interministerial report of 2025 listed about 45,300 holders of work permits or exemption certificates. The Minister of Labour, for his part, put forward the figure of 52,000 foreign workers, not counting the holders of Occupation Permits, nor the thousands of foreign students authorised to work. By relating these numbers to the active population, one obtains a proportion of the order of 8%. It is a calculation, not a statistic published as such, but it gives a reliable order of magnitude.

Yet this raw percentage hides the essential: their weight is infinitely more determining than these 8% suggest, for they are concentrated in the sectors that make our real economy run — construction, manufacturing and textile, hospitality. Remove them from these sectors, and it is not 8% of activity that wavers, but entire industries. This same interministerial report formulates it without detour: foreign labour is not a threat, but a complementary and essential catalyst of our growth. Without it, the growth objective of 3 to 4% would simply be out of reach.

Is the brain drain one of the reasons we recruit massively abroad? 

We export our qualified talents and import labour to fill the void they leave. Thousands of Mauritians — doctors, engineers, accountants, IT specialists — choose emigration for better salaries, a better quality of life, and broader prospects. The minister, during our 15th edition of HR Café, himself recognised it: too many workers, here, occupy jobs that correspond neither to their qualifications nor to their aspirations, which feeds frustration and departure.

We therefore live a double hemorrhage: we lose our brains at the top and we struggle to fill our professions at the bottom. Recruiting abroad treats the symptom, not the disease. The real question is not “how to replace those who leave,” but “why do they leave, and what must change so that they stay.” As long as we do not create, here, the conditions of retention — recognition, remuneration, meaning — we will continue to empty a bathtub while keeping the tap open.

But the brain drain is only one piece of a larger picture. Our population decreases and ages: fewer births, a workforce that contracts year after year, and soon more retirees than actives to support them. To this demographic reality is added a profound change of values among our youth. Young Mauritians no longer want the same professions, nor the same conditions, as their elders; they seek meaning, balance, consideration. And when they look elsewhere, they see there what they lack here: more opportunities, and above all a true meritocracy, where one progresses by one’s talent and work rather than by one’s relations. It is not a whim; it is a change of era. 

These forces — the emigration of talents, the demographic decline, the mutation of values and the attraction of a more meritocratic elsewhere — all converge towards the same point. It is their convergence that explains why this recourse imposes itself on us, for lack of alternative, rather than being a deliberate choice.

The government has brought changes in the recruitment of foreign workers. In certain sectors, like construction, operators say they have led to delays in recruitment. Is that also your opinion?

It is, first, necessary to understand what has changed. The government has reformed the recruitment of foreign workers around three main axes: a simplification and an acceleration of the process of granting work permits; the introduction of the principle of inability to recruit, which now obliges the employer to demonstrate that he has not found local labour before looking abroad; and an ethical recruitment framework imposing the recourse to accredited agencies in order to clean up the sector. 

My opinion is nuanced. On the substance, these reforms are sound: they protect local employment, they clean up a recruitment sector that the minister himself qualified as “mafia-like,” and they guarantee the dignity of foreign workers. I fully support them in their principle. On the form, however, one must be lucid: any large-scale reform goes through a period of trial, and it is precisely what we are living. The passage to this new system is accompanied by real start-up difficulties — procedures still poorly oiled, criteria that employers discover and interpret case by case, institutions that must absorb an influx of requests without always having the means… 

This results in considerable delays, and they do not strike construction alone. Hospitality, manufacturing, agro-industry — all the sectors that depend structurally on foreign labour today — suffer the repercussions. This is occurring at the worst moment. At the time when the country has set itself a growth objective of 3 to 4%, when order books are full and construction sites launched, each blocked permit translates into slowed activity, extra costs, and sometimes compromised projects. One asks the economy to accelerate while tightening the brake on one of its essential inputs. The mistake is to oppose rigour and speed, as if one had to choose.   

The true answer is a transition solution — an intermediate mechanism, the time that the new system reaches its cruising speed. One can imagine an accelerated and supervised treatment to absorb the backlog: a dedicated counter for pending files, guaranteed deadlines, and a transitional mechanism for requests already engaged before the entry into force of the new rules, even if it means tightening their application once the delay is cleared. It is not a matter of softening the ethical principles — they are non-negotiable —, but of giving oneself the means to apply them without suffocating the economy in the interval. Reform, yes; but reform without breaking the machine while repairing it. To control better must, here, not mean to control more slowly.

Another issue is that foreign workers need to be trained, but some companies or SMEs do not have the means to do that… 

It is the knot of the problem, and it strikes head-on our SMEs, the backbone of the Mauritian economy. A large company absorbs the cost of training — linguistic, technical, safety — of its foreign labour. A small structure simply does not have the means. To impose on it this burden without counterpart is to condemn it either to renounce the recruitment it needs, or to employ poorly prepared labour, to the detriment of quality and safety.

My conviction is that one must encourage rather than constrain, and target this encouragement exclusively on SMEs. A training tax credit, or a partial reimbursement of costs incurred, reserved for small and medium enterprises that train their foreign labour, would be a simple and measurable lever which does not weigh on the already fragile treasury of these structures. Training then becomes an investment rewarded, not a penalty suffered.

But financial encouragement will not suffice if the ecosystem that must carry it remains lethargic. And it is here that I want to be frank: our institutions dedicated to the development of SMEs and of skills — I think of the HRDC as well as of the support organisations to SMEs — must be profoundly revitalised. Too often, they are perceived by entrepreneurs as distant administrative counters rather than as field partners. This perception must be overturned. That supposes truly accessible mechanisms, short deadlines, close support, and above all a true listening of the needs of small enterprises, sector by sector.  

An SME authority that goes towards the entrepreneur, that simplifies instead of complicating, that trains instead of only regulating… That is what is lacking.

The question of the training of foreign workers is only the revealer of a larger issue: that of the vitality of our fabric of SMEs. A small, well-supported enterprise, trains better, recruits better, grows better. To give back breath to our support institutions means to arm our SMEs not only to welcome foreign labour, but to build, in the long term, their own local succession.

And an island that takes care of its small enterprises is an island that takes care of its future.