Entrepreneurship and project management are two disciplines that, in practice, are almost impossible to separate. A great idea can take a team only so far — what turns it into a working business is the ability to plan, deliver, and adapt. That is exactly the message Shoayb Peerbocus, President of the PMI Mauritius Chapter, brought to a hall full of young entrepreneurs at Loreto College of Rose-Hill on the morning Saturday 2 May 2026, as part of a workshop organised by JA Mascareignes for participants of the JA Company Program.

A Partnership Built Around Young Talent

The JA Company Program is JA Mascareignes' flagship initiative — an 11-week, hands-on entrepreneurship journey for students aged 15 to 19. Teams identify a problem in their community, develop a business venture around it, take it to market, and ultimately compete in a national final.

PMI Mauritius is proud to support the program year after year by:

• Providing project management coaching to participating teams,
• Evaluating projects against PM best-practice criteria, and
• Sitting on the final selection panel as project management experts, helping identify both the overall winner and the team that has best applied project management discipline to its venture.

The national winner goes on to represent Mauritius at the JA Africa Regional Company of the Year Competition — so the stakes, and the learning curve, are real.

Running a Company Is Running a Project

Shoayb walked the students through the fundamentals of the project management framework, anchored in the realities of running a JA company. The session was deliberately structured around the journey a team would take from concept to tradefair:

• Starting a project well — defining the idea, scope, and objectives before jumping into execution.
• Planning — building a workable schedule, breaking down the work, and setting milestones aligned with the JA Company Program timeline.
• Managing cost, schedule, budget, and risk — the four levers that decide whether a young company finishes the year profitable or just busy.
• Stakeholder management — recognising teachers, mentors, customers, and shareholders as people whose expectations need to be understood and managed.
• Communication and team management — the soft skills that make or break a team of teenagers juggling school, exams, and a real-world business.
• Successful delivery — what it actually takes to bring a product or service to a paying customer and close out a project with confidence.

It was great to see the room engaged throughout — questions, notes, and that particular kind of curiosity that you only get when students realise the frameworks being taught are tools they can actually use next week.

Why This Matters

At PMI Mauritius, we believe project management is a life skill long before it is a career. When a 17-year-old learns to identify a stakeholder, build a simple risk register, or run a productive team meeting, they are gaining capabilities that will serve them whether they end up founding a startup or leading a school project.

Our partnership with JA Mascareignes — who have spent 15 years empowering Mauritian youth — is one of the most rewarding chapters of our community outreach. Every year, we get to watch students arrive with a spark of an idea and leave with a working company, a sharper toolkit, and a much clearer sense of what professional delivery looks like.

A heartfelt thank you to JA Mascareignes for the invitation, to Loreto College of Rose-Hill for hosting, and most of all to the students who showed up on a Saturday morning ready to learn. We can't wait to see what you build.