Indigenous women across the Oceanic Pacific are building businesses, creating economic models that honour cultural protocols, and defining what prosperity means for their communities and future generations. Yet international development conversations about economic power have too often excluded their leadership and perspectives.
At Women Deliver 2026 in Narrm (Melbourne), RDI Network, ACFID and First Australians Capital co-hosted a side event, On Our Terms, to shift that focus. Moderated by Renee Cremer, Deputy CEO of Community First Development, the session brought together Sisi Coalala (Pacific Disability Forum), Elaine Jolliffe (First Nations Economics), Jessica Walters (Monash University) and Alice Tamang (Connecting Cultures International) for an honest conversation about what economic empowerment looks like when Indigenous women define it themselves.
As Cremer framed it at the outset, the question isn’t whether Indigenous women can lead economically. They already do. The question is whether international development governance systems and policies are ready to genuinely support that leadership.
Economic empowerment on Indigenous women’s own terms
Sisi Coalala opened by describing the Pacific Disability Forum’s approach to economic empowerment for women with disabilities: it has to be led by women with disabilities themselves, from design through to implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Anything less risks missing what communities actually need.
She pointed to practical barriers that often go unaddressed, particularly for women in rural and maritime communities. Limited access to banks and e-wallets, combined with low financial literacy, keeps many women from building the small businesses that could support their families. The Forum runs financial literacy training directly through its member organisations, starting with fundamentals like budgeting and saving, and helps women identify income opportunities already available to them, whether that’s selling produce from a home garden or running a small poultry operation. Seed funding provided through a post-pandemic recovery program with Impact Ventures Fiji helped establish small businesses that are, in many cases, still running today.
Jessica Walters spoke to the compounding pressures facing Indigenous women in rural and remote communities as climate change accelerates. Many work in agriculture and other industries directly exposed to climate impacts, forcing personal and economic transitions alongside the practical demands of caring for country and passing down cultural knowledge to the next generation. She noted a real tension here: legal and land management frameworks often restrict the very practices communities want to apply, even as demand grows for Indigenous expertise in land management and sustainability roles. The opportunity exists, she said, but the pathways into those roles for Indigenous women are not yet reliably there.
Where the barriers really sit
Elaine Jolliffe was direct about what’s holding Indigenous women back economically in regional and remote Australia: not capability, but the systems Indigenous women have to navigate once they try to move from informal to formal economic activity. Procurement processes, access to capital and market access are all designed, she argued, in ways that structurally exclude local knowledge. She described a case in regional WA where a well-run, capable local business was effectively locked out of a government contract by procurement requirements that favoured a much larger, non-local competitor. Research by First Nations Economics with the University of Sydney has found the same pattern repeated across policy settings, with barriers stacking on barriers for Indigenous women’s economic participation specifically.
Alice Tamang described economic power, in her own experience and in conversations with Indigenous women across many contexts, as fundamentally about choice: the ability to decide what work to take on and who to work with, in ways that align with personal and cultural values rather than externally set metrics. She was candid about the tension of working within systems, particularly in international development, that prioritise output and efficiency over the relational, trust-based, long-term ways of working that many Indigenous women and communities value. Self-determination, she said, means being able to set your own tone, build your own systems and define what success looks like on your own terms.
From capacity building to genuine authority
A recurring theme across the panel was scepticism about the language of “capacity building.” Tamang argued the term wrongly assumes something is missing in Indigenous communities, when in reality the capability, leadership and expertise already exist. What’s missing is systems willing to recognise, resource and back that expertise directly, rather than filtering it through predetermined frameworks and intermediaries.
Jolliffe extended this to procurement and place-based development specifically, arguing Indigenous women-led enterprises need to be brought into decision-making from the beginning, not consulted after frameworks and funding decisions have already been made. Real outcomes follow, she said, when Indigenous women have a genuine say in how programs and resources are shaped, not just a seat at a table someone else has already set.
Walters connected this to her work bridging community and research institutions. She described the ongoing effort of holding universities and researchers accountable to genuinely co-developed, respectful engagement with community, rather than treating ethics processes as a box-ticking exercise. Her view was clear: the responsibility for change sits with institutions adapting their ways of working, not with Indigenous people fitting into existing structures.
Turning knowledge into action
Coalala shared a concrete example of what practical change can look like, describing UN Women’s Markets for Change project, which worked with municipal councils and disability organisations across Fiji to make public markets more accessible and safer for women with disabilities. Improvements as straightforward as accessible washrooms, secure stall space and safer movement through crowded market areas gave women new independence to trade, sell and shop without relying on family members to do it for them.
Looking ahead, Coalala proposed three practical steps to strengthen economic leadership for women with disabilities in the Pacific: building a mentoring network of women with disabilities who are already economic leaders, establishing cooperatives that draw on the strength of extended family and communal structures common across the Pacific, and putting ongoing mentoring and monitoring support in place well beyond the initial seed funding stage, recognising the real pressures that can pull a new business off track.
What actually shifts systems
Responding to audience questions about engaging respectfully with Indigenous communities, panellists were consistent: relationships take time, and there is no shortcut. Tamang emphasised understanding a community’s history and context before engaging, being flexible about what that engagement looks like, and being genuinely prepared to change direction based on what community says, rather than arriving with a predetermined plan. Jolliffe stressed shifting from a transactional to a trust-building approach, with no fixed timeline for how long that takes. Walters added the importance of transparency, honesty and consistency, particularly around follow-through, and pointed to research prospectuses as one practical tool some communities are using to manage the volume of external interest and set clear terms for engagement upfront.
On what actually shifts entrenched systems, Jolliffe pointed to finding and working within the grey areas of policy to build programs that outlast government and funding cycles. Tamang’s experience pointed to individuals within large institutions who are willing to trust Indigenous-led approaches and resource them properly, creating pockets of better outcomes that, over time, build the evidence base for broader change.
Watch the full session
The full panel discussion is available to watch on YouTube.
Thank you to Renee Cremer, Sisi Coalala, Elaine Jolliffe, Jessica Walters and Alice Tamang for such a generous and grounded conversation, and to ACFID and First Australians Capital for co-hosting this session at Women Deliver 2026.
