Canada-New Zealand collaboration on Indigenous trade issues and inter-governmental a powerful catalyst for change – Anishinabek News
October 3, 2022
NEW ZEALAND — Waubetek Business Development Corporation’s Dawn Madahbee Leach shared Waubetek’s model with the Māori during a late August visit to Aotearoa-New Zealand with Indigenous Services Canada Minister Patty Hajdu and other Indigenous leaders.
“There’s a lot of iwi-owned, or community owned, businesses there — they have a lot of land tenure in these iwis, they have fisheries-related businesses, they have sheep farming, which was very interesting — and tourism,” says Madahbee Leach, general manager at Waubetek and chairperson of the National Indigenous Economic Development Board. “One of the things they really want to develop is the individual entrepreneurs, so they were really interested in the model of the Waubetek Business Development Corporation. They want to support individual entrepreneurship in a way similar that we do, so they’re interested in forming a network of Māori financial institutions based on the model of Waubetek. The majority of the businesses that Waubetek invests in are individual entrepreneurs, although we do also invest in community-owned businesses.”
