Call for better Pacific support in NZ’s far south

There are only 3000 Pacific people in Dunedin, in New Zealand’s south, but an innovation workshop for Pasifika entrepreneurs there has heard loud calls for more opportunities and support.

It was the first time Mahuki - Te Papa’s innovation hub for developing digital businesses in the culture and heritage sector brought its two-day workshop to Dunedin.

Twenty-two people took part with the focus on developing the participants’ social enterprise or business ideas.

Mahuki’s outreach manager Sulu Fiti said the ideas were focused on helping the community, and ranged from a resource to help people pronounce Pacific names correctly to shoes made from plastic waste.

“There’s a huge appetite for people like us to come down and run these sort of workshops, people are actually screaming for it so they’ve actually asked us to come down and do another one,” he said.

One of the participants was Melissa Lama, a 25-year-old Tongan mother of two studying politics and public health at Otago University.

After seeing the difficulties her mother faced when trying to fill out immigration forms and access social services, Ms Lama said she wanted to find a way to make things easier for Pasifika people.

“If we think of the disadvantaged communities and communities that struggle to access some of these services, it is Pacific,” she said.

“In order to remove that barrier, we’ve got to think about how we can move with the times but also be culturally aware and sensitive to some of their limits.”