In 2016, Haitelenisia Angilau was ready to return to work but not quite ready to give up her full-time duties as a new mother.

She began thinking of ways to stay productive and advance her career without sacrificing her time with family.

That’s when Mrs Angilau was inspired to become her own boss and start Grace Consultancy, a Tonga-based company offering what she terms as the three ‘Ts’: translation, tutoring and travel agency services.

Equipped with a laptop and her experience as a writer and former teacher, Haitelenisia converted her house into an office space and began marketing her services on Facebook.

“In Tonga, the concept of entrepreneurship is fairly young so a great advantage I have is that there is not a lot of competition in the market, especially for specialised services and skills that I offer,” Mrs Angilau said.

Facebook was where she found her market, a platform with 78,000 active Tongan users in a country of 105,000.

Leveraging digital technologies also allowed her to continue earning and advance her professional development through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tonga’s economy is heavily reliant on the Tourism sector which makes up 33 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in border closures from March 2020 and consequently determinately impacted cash flows within the country.

In 2020, Mrs Angilau stopped offering travel agency services as a consequence of COVID’s impact on international travel and Tonga’s tourism industry.

Instead, she diversified into areas like report writing, event planning and coordinating, strategic planning and communications.

Demand for the services offered by Grace Consultancy increased during the pandemic, Mrs Angilau says, and remains at an all-time high. The company now employs four women and has outsourced work to over twenty consultants to cater for the demand.

The growth of Grace Consultancy is an example of how entrepreneurship can be one of the most effective drivers of economic growth and development, spurring innovation, creating jobs, driving investment, and lifting the quality of life for entire economies.

However, there are still challenges unique to the Tongan market that need to be overcome for entrepreneurs like Mrs Angilau to maximise their potential.

The UN Capital Development Fund’s Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in the Pacific report identifies these challenges as being both structural and cultural in nature. The report has information on Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea.

Examples of structural barriers identified in Tonga is the lengthy and inefficient administrative and legal process of starting a business in Tonga, on top of the restricted procedures and structures required for scaling and business growth.

The report found that these challenges were particularly faced by digital entrepreneurs who are unable to register their businesses due to lack of a physical office.

In addition, cultural perceptions around entrepreneurship are not positive, something Ms Angilau is all too familiar with.

Entrepreneurship is associated with school dropouts and those who cannot get and hold jobs, and there is considerable discrimination against women entrepreneurs.

“The cultural and traditional perspectives of women belonging in the home and the expectations by friends and family to receive free services made it difficult for me to place value on my services in Tonga,” Mrs Angilau said.

She has often found herself in a position where the interests of her business and her cultural/familial responsibilities are at odds with another.

“Despite trying to run a business, if you were to say no to community requests you are perceived as being unkind and inconsiderate,” Mrs Angilau added.

The UNCDF-led Pacific Digital Economy Programme (PDEP) was founded to support digital entrepreneurs across the region expand their businesses and help grow local economies.

PDEP is jointly administered by UNCDF, the UN Conference on Trade and Development and UN Development Programme. The programme is funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The Programme is working directly with stakeholders to help overcome the challenges identified in the entrepreneurship ecosystem report by, among other things, providing a platform for entrepreneurs to voice their concerns.

A recent webinar hosted on Strengthening the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in the Pacific, for instance, doubled as a dialogue between entrepreneurs, development agencies and regulators.

Mrs Angilau was a panelist and proposed the creation of a communal virtual space where entrepreneurs can access information on legal processes and support available for startups to increase efficiency.

This recommendation was reiterated in the entrepreneurship ecosystem report where the biggest factor to improving the support ecosystem in the Pacific is guiding the entrepreneur through the existing network. The creation of a one-stop shop platform should then enable entrepreneurs to plot out a step-by-step pathway of support from idea to growth.

Despite existing challenges, Mrs Angilau encourages other Tongans to pursue their own businesses, to take advantage of the opportunities in the country for providing specialised skills and services like her own.