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Download AudioA Māori directory with over 9-thousand listed organisations and services is celebrating 30 years of existence with plans to develop even further online.
Virginia Tamanui from Te Aitanga a Mahaki and Ngaphuhi and her husband Shimmy (Sjimmy) Fransen from Suriname set up Te Aka Kūmara o Aotearoa or TAKOA in 1993 as a way to bring whanau together.
She says the idea snowballed.
“I think it was that people want to be found, they want to be acknowledged as existing somewhere in the world – and if they were Maori we wanted to find them. Lots of things have been made possible through the directory. And the more you find – like whanaungatanga – it just snowballs,” Dr Tamanui says.
She’s looking at expanding TAKOA into mobile and web applications, cloud-and-business integration.
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