"When I make a bus available, it's full! Today, there is everything to do for the elderly." Mirella Angèle, gerontology facilitator and social health mediator, created "Le plaisir des âges" in 2023. Tea dances, outings to restaurants or the beach, well-being and beauty workshops: her organization organizes outings for seniors, a rare local initiative in what is called the "silver economy".
"The goal is to break their isolation, to maintain their autonomy and their cognitive abilities," explains Ms. Angèle, who worked in this sector for a long time before launching her own business.
The field is promising: according to INSEE forecasts, Martinique and Guadeloupe, once among the youngest departments in France, will become respectively the 1st and 6th oldest in 2050.
By 2070, the proportion of those aged 65 and over will even double (39%), according to the statistical institute. An upheaval due to the increase in life expectancy and the decline in fertility, but especially to the departure of young people, faced with a lack of economic prospects.
A departure synonymous with cultural revolution: family solidarity, traditionally strong in overseas territories, is diminishing with these mass departures - around 3.000 per year in Guadeloupe.
The elderly people Mirella Angèle cares for often live alone and at home. "They need activities that allow them to reconnect with others," explains the fifty-year-old.
Essential outings, she adds, because her protégés "no longer drive" and are often without means of transport, in an often difficult social context.
In Guadeloupe, 22% of retirees benefit from the minimum old-age pension and 11% of seniors live below the Guadeloupean poverty line - different from the national poverty line - of 790 euros per month.
Lack of manpower
A first step was taken in October, during a seminar on the "silver economy" in Les Abymes (Grande-Terre) which saw the State, the Regional Health Agency (ARS), the region and the department sign a framework agreement to structure this sector.
This project is structured around a territorial pole of economic cooperation (PTCE) which should make it possible to coordinate local skills and respond to the specific needs of Guadeloupean seniors.
Ludmilla Canourgues-Mangachoff, co-president of the PTCE, insists on the need for this local approach: "We know that we are going to encounter difficulties. Our youth are leaving, we are going to lack manpower, training and appetite for these 'care' professions", she warns.
According to her, this hub is essential for anticipating the challenges of aging: "We cannot wait for national solutions to resolve our local problems."
At the national level, aging has been integrated into regional health priorities since the 2018 plan, underlines Laurent Legendart, director of ARS Guadeloupe.
It is crucial "to adapt the medical-social offer, whether for home care, SSIAD (home nursing services, editor's note), primary care or accommodation for dependent people," he explains.
Especially since the structures are still limited. In the Overseas Territories, "the Ehpad stock is very aging and (...) some establishments are very dilapidated, even dilapidated", explained the former minister Ericka Bareigts in a parliamentary report in 2020.
Arnaud Duranthon, sub-prefect in charge of social cohesion, acknowledges that mobilizing stakeholders around the issue of aging remains difficult, because "political attention is more easily focused on the issues of youth."
However, he warns: the next stage will be when "we will hit this wall" of aging head on. Without anticipation of this demographic shock, the impact could be devastating.