L-R: Deputy Police Commissioner of the Cook Islands Police Force, Akatauira Matapo; Commissioner of Police, Teokotai Joseph; and Aashqeen Hasan Director Corporate Services. Photo: UNCDF.
In a Small Island Developing Nation where tourism drives nearly 70 percent of the economy and outer island communities remain underserved by mainstream financial systems, the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) is working with government and private sector partners to strengthen the inclusive digital ecosystems, to make them more accessible, transparent, and investable.
In the Cook Islands, with support from the European Union, and the governments of New Zealand and Australia, UNCDF together with UNDP is expanding access to financial services, improving trust in digital systems, and supporting more efficient public service delivery.
The Cook Islands government, through its National Digital Strategy (2024 to 2030), has made digital transformation a priority for building economic resilience, creating jobs, delivering public services, and promoting financial inclusion.
In keeping with that strategy, UNCDF has supported the government by deploying a grant and providing technical assistance to address long-standing structural barriers to digital payments, strengthening the legal and policy environment for digital transactions, and building mechanisms to deliver digitally enabled public services.
Putting financial literacy online
In April, the Bank of Cook Islands (BCI) officially launched E-Marama, a bilingual digital financial literacy platform developed in partnership with UNCDF and supported by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Management.
The platform offers structured e-learning modules covering budgeting, savings, and digital safety, delivered through a combination of online self-paced learning, and facilitated face-to-face sessions.
The initiative emerged from a national digital financial literacy assessment that revealed a significant gap: while Cook Islanders were increasingly active online, many lacked the foundational knowledge to engage safely and productively with digital financial services.
Older populations were losing money to online scams. Micro-entrepreneurs struggled to distinguish revenue from profit. Outer island communities remained underserved by mainstream financial systems and largely outside the digital economy.
E-Marama is designed to address these gaps and help the local population benefit from the country’s growing digital economy through education and awareness.
Designed for both online and in-person learning, the platform helps people strengthen money management skills, understand basic business concepts, and engage more with digital financial services. By reaching both urban and outer island communities, it supports wider participation in the digital economy.
"People on the outer islands should have the same access to information and technology as those based in Rarotonga. We're one jurisdiction, it should be the same for everyone,” said Mani Mate, the ministry’s Director for the Development Coordination Division.
The Ministry of Finance sees the platform as a catalyst for broader economic participation, particularly for the outer islands where digital access has the potential to create economic growth.
As BCI's senior leadership noted at the launch in Rarotonga, the platform gives the bank a way not only to educate customers but to understand them, tracking participation by age, gender, and island of residence, to target future engagement.
This data can help financial institutions better understand underserved customers, tailor future outreach, and generate insights that support more inclusive financial service delivery.
"Our people are very visual and hands-on learners. There's a lot of learning available everywhere in the world right now, but they don't access it — so our thinking was to kick-start them through facilitated, face-to-face sessions [through E-Marama],” said Robert Matheson, Chief Information Officer, Bank of Cook Islands.
Digitizing the license, unlocking the economy
Across town, a quieter but equally consequential transformation is underway at the Cook Islands Police Force.
Through UNCDF support, the country is digitizing its entire driver licensing system. The project will replace a paper-heavy, three-platform manual process - that kept applicants, including tourists, waiting upwards of 30 minutes - with an integrated digital system that automates updates, enables online applications, and strengthens identity verification.
The government believes the economic stakes are significant. Most visitors require a driver's license to move freely around the islands. Every hour spent in a licensing queue is an hour not spent in the local economy. During peak season, the licensing office processes up to 300 applications per day, says Police Commissioner, Teokotai Joseph. And it is managed by just two staff members juggling systems that do not communicate with each other.
"The more we've been talking about this, the more excited I become. I can see so many other areas this will improve — including firearms licenses, infringement notices, vehicle registration. There's quite a lot of positives I can see,” Joseph said.
UNCDF provided technical assistance to the Cook Islands Police Force for the project, and staff with UNCDF’s Pacific Digital Economy Programme continue to act in an advisory capacity to see the initiative succeed and scale.
Police station on the Cook Islands. Photo: UNCDF.
The support is helping move the system from a manual process to a more efficient, integrated, and user-friendly public service. Over time, this kind of digital public infrastructure can reduce costs, improve transparency, and strengthen trust in the systems that people and businesses rely on.
“In the Cook Islands, we’ve used grants and technical assistance to lay the digital rails an inclusive economy runs on. Rails are the first step. Once they're in place, innovators can build on them and investment can follow,” said Maria Perdomo, UNCDF’s Regional Investment Team Lead for the Asia Pacific region.
“That is precisely the role our new Strategic Framework is built for: creating the enabling conditions and de-risking the environment so that as these markets mature, partners and our own financing instruments can build on solid ground and scale.”
Building for the long term
Both initiatives jointly implemented by UNCDF and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reflect UNCDF's broader approach in Small Island Developing States. In the Cook Islands, that has meant using grants and hands-on technical assistance to help build systems that governments and institutions can independently sustain and scale.
"UNCDF's success around the PDEP has been because of being in-country; being able to understand the local context, the politics, the cultural nuances around how to get through different issues and get stuff done,” said New Zealand Deputy High Commissioner to the Cook Islands, Ryan Brown.
Sustainability has been a guiding principle in both initiatives. By supporting locally owned systems, UNCDF is helping create the enabling conditions for digital solutions to take root, scale, and contribute to a more inclusive and investable economy.
