DIVA — Mauritius' Government-Wide AI Chatbot for Public Service Access

Mauritius' Central Informatics Bureau, under the Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation, operates DIVA (Digital Interactive Virtual Assistant), a government-wide AI chatbot that has been deployed since 2023 across eight ministries and departments to answer citizen queries and direct users to services.

DIVA aims to give citizens a single, multilingual (English, French, Mauritian Creole) point of access to government services via the government website, WhatsApp, a mobile app and a humanoid kiosk interface, reducing reliance on phone calls and in-person office visits. The government has stated DIVA will become the default AI interface for every future government mobile service, including an upcoming chatbot layer for the National Electronic Licensing System (NELS).

The system uses natural-language-processing and machine-learning components hosted on Amazon Web Services, with its knowledge base updated by scraping government websites.

The platform's own operator reports DIVA handling over 500 conversations per month, replacing some phone calls and physical office visits. No independent evaluation of cost savings, resolution accuracy or citizen satisfaction has been published. In April 2026, Mauritius launched a National AI Strategy and FAIR Guidelines (Fairness, Accountability, Inclusiveness and Integrity, Responsibility), signalling that formal governance and evaluation structures for tools like DIVA are still being built out.

The rubric evaluation (overall score 53.3/100) rates evidence of impact and transparency as weak - usage figures are self-reported and no bias testing or performance disclosure specific to DIVA has been published - while noting the system is already live across eight ministries on a portable, commodity-cloud architecture, operated by a dedicated public body now covered by Mauritius' national AI ethics framework.