Overview

JCI Curepipe and JCI Saint Denis have been twinning chapters since the early 90s and along the years, this twinning has become dormant. Back in 2018, during the JCI World Congress in Goa, the twinning has been revived between the two chapters. We have since then been in discussion about sharing plan of action for 2019 and more. However, when the two 2019 Local Presidents of the respective chapters met for the 2019 JCI Africa and The Middle East Conference, it ignited the idea of a regional project that would address community needs in the two neighbouring islands.

Multi-twinning project got expanded when each of them had a twinning with JCI Madagascar local organisations (JCI Ilionarivo and JCI Voht’Iriarivo). They proposed the two local organisations to get on board to work on a common project in the three islands to make greater impact.

There was sufficient motive to engage on a common project as the three islands being small developing states (SIDS) share similar economic and sustainable development challenges such as decreasing availability of resources, increasing susceptibility to natural disasters and excessive dependence on international trade. We thus had to identify one common problem in the region. However, we deemed it important to conduct a needs analysis in the three islands.

PHASE 1: The first part of the project was to review daily newspaper articles from the period April 2019 to September 2019 (6 months) and to categorise all the articles that have been published. Grouping of the common social issues were made. The three islands, each came up with pertaining issues that is affecting them. For Mauritius, we had found that juvenile delinquency, road accidents, domestic violence and environment pollution were amongst the more reported cases. For Reunion, they found that congestion, crime rate and environmental degradation were flaring. In Madagascar, it was the domestic violence, congestion, crime rate and environmental pollution that was on the rise.

PHASE 2: Once we have completed our articles review, we began to support our research with reports that have been published by International Organisation to assess whether it tallies with our list of issues. The reports that we have used are :

1. The Five-Year Review of the Mauritius Strategy for Further Implementation of the Barbados Programme of Action for Sustainable Development of SIDS.
2. Madagascar Economic Update by World Bank
3. UNICEF Annual Report 2017 of Madagascar
4. Grand Challenges for the Republic of Mauritius 2018 by Mauritius Research Council
5. l’île de la réunion et les enjeux de l’émancipation

PHASE 3: Post the review of newspaper articles and reports of international organisation, we did a tabulation to highlight the common issue in the three islands and the one we found common was environmental pollution and also the vulnerability to climate change. From September 2019 to November 2019, focus groups using the Active Citizens Framework (ACF) were carried out in the three islands. The aim is to identify the root cause of environmental pollution in Mauritius.

The focus group also termed as ‘After Citoyen’ was carried out in parallel in Reunion and Mauritius and participants from both countries had the opportunity to interact on the subject through video conferencing. JCI Ilionarivo conducted the focus group in November 2019.