| Social entrepreneur and U.S. Exchange Alumna Manuia Maiti dedicates herself to training Pacific islanders how to run sustainable businesses. ©Manuia MAITI |
[Tahiti, June 2022] French Polynesian entrepreneur Manuia Maiti knew she wanted to contribute to her country’s economic development when she was just 19. A recent university graduate in Tahiti, she realized her country had a huge trade imbalance and she wanted to do something about it.
“I felt lost in my life sometimes. So, I started participating in trainings, which shaped my idea to open my own trade-export business to contribute to my country,” says Maiti.
Maiti was selected in 2019 for the Young Pacific Leaders (YPL), a U.S. government exchange program designed to harness the potential of civic and business-minded youth across the hundreds of islands in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.
| Meeting entrepreneurs in five U.S. cities during the International Visitors Leadership Program inspired Maiti to launch her own business based on humanity and empowerment. © Cynthia Norcross Willson |
She was later chosen for another prestigious U.S. government exchange, the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) and traveled for three weeks from Washington D.C. to Honolulu to learn about cutting-edge startups.
It was the city of Detroit that won her heart.
“I was so inspired by the stories of social entrepreneurs – seeing how Detroit went from decay to revival through startups and new technologies, attracting more small businesses.”
Maiti brought these lessons home to the Pacific and founded Tahiti Art Crafts, an online marketplace for artisans operating across 118 islands in the Pacific. Her goal is to provide local artisans with greater exposure to international markets, to support greater export of Polynesian traditional goods, like baskets and wood carvings.
| French Polynesia’s remote island geography poses a challenge for entrepreneurs. [Photo: Public Domain] |
The challenge for most Tahitian artisans is geography – most live on tiny specks of land in the vast Pacific and have little interaction with outsiders, making it hard to start a business.
“In some islands, a lot of people know how to weave and make mats,” says Maiti. “If you have exposure outside of where you live, only then you can sell your products.”
Beyond helping to build an online marketplace, Maiti is helping to teach islanders how to value traditional crafts through her NGO TUPU. With TUPU she launched a project called Rima’ī for a Sustainable Living, which she founded with a Young Pacific Leaders small grant.
Rima’ī means “handicrafts” in Tahitian. The project offers 3-day workshops that provide practical skills training in registering a business, simple accounting, pricing, and the basics of photography with a phone. The goal is to create consistent pricing structures and find a marketplace to make their activities sustainable. Maiti hopes this will also help artisans to properly value their craft.
| Polynesian wood carvings and other handicrafts stem from a long cultural tradition, passed down from generation to generation. ©Tahiti Art Crafts |
“Rima’i for a Sustainable Living is a rural program to raise awareness among indigenous populations that handicrafts are valued, and can be a means to earn a living,” says Maiti. Polynesian art varies from island to island and involves traditional techniques that are handed down through the generations – a practice which is slowly dying out.
Maiti’s experience as a social entrepreneur made her a natural fit in 2021 to implement French Polynesia’s first cohort of the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE), a global women’s economic empowerment exchange program of the U.S. Department of State.
| To train women the skills they need to launch or scale a business, Maiti sent AWE training materials by boat to remote Pacific islands of Bora Bora and Mo’orea. ©Manuia Maiti and TUPU |
“We sent our training materials by cargo boat and took small planes to Bora-Bora and Mo’orea,” she says, beaming at the memory of training 60 women over two months on two remote tropical islands. “It was so hot!”
AWE uses digital technology and the DreamBuilder online learning platform, developed by Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School for Global Management with funding from the Freeport-McMoRan Foundation, to teach women core business skills like strategic planning, financial management and marketing.
Maiti visits artisans at a local market in Bora Bora as part of entrepreneurship training. © Manuia Maiti and TUPU |
“AWE is transformational. It is a very dense, complete program that touches on all aspects of business,” she says. “In 4 weeks, we saw women go from being shy with hunched shoulders, to standing up tall, showing prototypes of their products and trying new things.”
AWE was one of the first in-person programs to resume in Tahiti after COVID, and Maiti says it could not have come at a better time. “People here have suffered during the pandemic. Some islands depend on tourism here, and a lot of people lost their jobs.”
| Maiti and her AWE cohort celebrate the end of training on the island of Mo‘orea. @Manuia Maiti and TUPU |
She hopes that her online platform will help bring her corner of the world closer to global consumers – and keep the best of Tahitian culture alive. She says her experience as a U.S. exchange alumna has been pivotal to her own development as an entrepreneur; it also inspires her to teach other women about business and build up the entrepreneurial ecosystem around her.
“When you feel you want to do something – go for it,” she says. “Dream your dream. You have to shine, so that you enable others to shine.”
| Since 2021, AWE has empowered more than 500 women across the Pacific to launch or scale their business. ©Manuia Maiti and TUPU |
Launched globally in 2019, AWE has empowered more than 16,000 women around the world with the knowledge, networks, and access they need to launch or scale a business. Since 2021, U.S. Consulate Auckland has run one of the world’s largest AWE programs in the Pacific, serving more than 500 women across New Zealand, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Niue, and Samoa.
