Indigenous Economic Power Project

Addressing a business blind spot

In 2018, Associate Professor Michelle Evans, now the Centre’s founding director, saw an ongoing problem with the decision making surrounding Indigenous business.

Governments had long gathered anonymised data about Australian business to examine the broader business sector and inform policies. However, these records did not identify businesses owned by First Nations people.

Some data had been kept by different entities to monitor Indigenous businesses in this manner, but the individual sources were disparate, and there was no all-encompassing dataset that collated all information in one place.

Associate Professor Evans could see that without reliable data that could be analysed, the Indigenous business sector would continue to be ignored.

Rectifying this ‘blind spot’ and collating relevant data became an ongoing, multi-year commitment for Associate Professor Evans and the Indigenous Business Research Group.

Bringing the sector together

The group partnered with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a collaboration that continues to give a strong foundation to the research, while ensuring the Indigenous sovereignty of the data.

This has been a key focus since the beginning – if this data was to be gathered, examined and analysed so thoroughly for years to come, it was vital that the project was driven by First Nations business leaders, for the express advantage of other First Nations business leaders.

With the assistance and support of Indigenous data custodians, Professor Evans and her team collated a unified database complete enough to support a visualisation of the Australian Indigenous Business Sector.

Regular analyses and visualisations of this dataset became the Snapshot project, which updated annually to allow for deeper insights over time.

The power of Indigenous business today

The most recent Snapshot study released earlier this year was the most complete picture of the Indigenous Business Sector released so far.

The longitudinal aspect of the Snapshot means that different datasets can be used to examine how the sector responded to economic policies like grant funding, as well as how businesses were affected by events like the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the most recent release, the Project found that the preferential contract procurement policies that continued throughout the pandemic contributed to the long-term survival of larger Indigenous-owned businesses. First Nations sole traders, however, who couldn’t benefit from such policies and are generally not as financially stable, were more likely to close during those economically challenging times.

Findings like this one show the ongoing effect of the Economic Indigenous Power Project’s fundamental tenet – to use longitudinal data to better understand and serve the Indigenous Business sector.

With this ever-evolving dataset maintained by an Indigenous-led research team within the ABS’s top-quality data environment, Dilin Duwa and the broader Australian business sector has a much clearer picture of the importance of Indigenous business in 2024 that it ever has before.

Read the most recent Snapshot report in full