What are Pasifika Challenges?

The first question we should probably ask is, what problems do we have to solve in the Pasifika community, and does tech even address those?

There's no point in having a solution first that starts looking for a problem to solve.
An analytical paper from the NZ Treasury titled "Pacific Peoples Wellbeing" was released in 2023 and can help us look at the top challenges as backed by the stats that have been collected on Pacific Peoples.

So what did the paper see as Pasifika’s biggest challenges?

Educational Achievement and Participation

The paper says 

“While educational achievement and participation rates by Pacific peoples have improved in almost all areas, these rates are still lower than those of the rest of the population.  Tertiary completion rates remain low, and young Pacific peoples identified as NEET (not in employment, education or training) are significantly higher than for other population groups except for Māori.”

This isn’t a big surprise for us; we’ve known school education has been a major issue for Pasifika, and the flow-on effect of that lands us with the kinds of employment and housing opportunities we see.

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Economic Disparities

From the paper:
“Pacific peoples have continued to earn lower wages than other ethnic groups. Labour market outcomes in part reflect differences in skills and qualifications but more importantly job characteristics and the industries that Pacific peoples work in.”

The labour market statistics from 2022 show us at a lower employment rate compared to the total population (69.3% for females and 74% for males).

It’s not hard to make the leap from “Educational Achievement and Participation” section before to the “Economic Disparities” we see in the paper:

“Pacific peoples also have low completion rates in tertiary education (see section 7.1) and high representation of youth not in employment, education or training (NEET). This has resulted in an over-representation of Pacific peoples in jobs that require fewer educational qualifications and are often low income and unstable” (bold is mine).

Health Challenges

 

The paper talks about Pacific people health experience:

“...especially in low rates of childhood immunisations and cervical and breast cancer screening.  These challenges are ongoing and risk compounding pre-pandemic disparities in access to health services and health outcomes. Coupled with increased experiences of discrimination, these factors impact on future physical and mental wellbeing.”

 

Housing Challenges

The housing challenge, in New Zealand, has been especially hard on Pasifika due to the compounding effects of the low education-employment cycle leading to poor quality, unsuitable, and unaffordable housing for Pasifika families.

“Pacific children (aged 5–14 years) are 50 times more likely to be hospitalised from developing acute rheumatic fever (ARF) compared to non-Pacific, non-Māori children.  Life expectancy for Pacific New Zealanders is 5 years lower for males and 4.5 years lower for females compared to the rest of the population.”

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Data Gaps

And to make things harder, we can't respond to these challenges in a systematic and hopefully systematic way, because of the challenges around collecting data and undertaking comprehensive and coherent quantitative and qualitative analysis relevant to Pacific wellbeing.

Future research depends on it, and any insights that could produce better outcomes depend on it.

When our community is staring down the barrel of the same challenges, yet again, and wondering what can be done about it—what can I tell them?
I know we all reach for the same dreams (or at least our parents reach for them for us, 😂)—sports career, doctor, lawyer, accountant.

There's nothing wrong with any of these professions, but I just want to put another option on the table that I know will help our community out as much as any of these professions would.
 

And here's why: