“While 100% of funds now collect sex-disaggregated data, not all are utilizing it effectively,” Melisha Sindiwan told Exepreneur.
Sindiwan is Regional Team Leader for Marketing at nasfund, Papua New Guinea’s largest superannuation fund, and Chairwoman of the Women in Super Network. The Network is the working body of an initiative that runs across the Pacific Islands Investment Forum, which describes itself as an industry group of 20 superannuation, provident, trust and sovereign funds in 12 Pacific countries, together holding the savings of more than 1.6 million members. Islands Business reported that PIIF was established in 2003 under its former name, the Pacific Provident Fund and Social Security CEO Forum, and that its board seats fund chief executives from Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Cook Islands and Papua New Guinea. Sindiwan does not run any of those funds. She chairs the group trying to get all of them to change the same thing at once.
Where the number came from
Everything the Network is doing traces to one document.
The Pacific Private Sector Development Initiative published A Secure Retirement: Leveling the Playing Field for Women in the Pacific in November 2022. PSDI is an Asian Development Bank technical assistance program run in partnership with the governments of Australia and New Zealand, and the study it commissioned was a diagnostic rather than an advocacy paper. Its finding, in PSDI’s own summary, was that women’s retirement fund balances across the region sit far below men’s and fall short of what retirement requires. The causes it named stack on each other: childbearing and caring responsibilities, a higher likelihood of low-paid or informal work, the gender pay gap, and longer life expectancy. A Pacific woman typically contributes less per year, contributes across fewer years, and then needs the balance to stretch further than a man’s.
What made the report useful to a body like PIIF was the second half, which moved past economics into design. PSDI found women’s access constrained by regulatory architecture, naming exemptions for employees in particular sectors and in small businesses, thin coverage of the informal economy where women are overrepresented, and restrictions on voluntary membership. It went further and named institutional causes inside the funds themselves: retirement savings being drawn down for non-retirement purposes, an absence of institutional commitment to gender equality, and limited outreach to women as potential members.
That last item lands closest to Sindiwan’s day job. She has spent her career in marketing.
Regional labour statistics support the diagnosis. Female labour force participation across the Pacific rose from 51 percent in 1999 to 55 percent in 2019, according to the Asian Development Bank’s summary brief on women’s economic empowerment in the region. The same brief records women’s employment rate running more than 20 percentage points behind men’s in the Marshall Islands and Samoa, and 30 points behind in Tuvalu, and notes that women in Papua New Guinea spend three times as long on unpaid domestic chores and care as men do.
Three resolutions, adopted in Port Moresby
PSDI ran a baseline survey in March 2023 to test what PIIF member funds could actually do on women’s access. The findings went to the 2023 PIIF CEO Forum, held in Port Moresby that same month and co-hosted by nasfund and Nambawan Super, where members adopted a set of resolutions.
PIIF’s own workshop report lists three. Resolution one covers the collection, analysis and reporting of sex-disaggregated data. Resolution two covers strategies for engaging the informal economy. Resolution three covers financial literacy training.
Six funds nominated staff to the working group formed to progress them, PSDI reported, among them the Fiji National Provident Fund, nasfund, Nambawan Super, the Solomon Islands National Provident Fund and the Tonga Retirement Fund Board.
Delivery followed. PSDI, PIIF and the Fiji National Provident Fund ran a two-day Women in Super workshop in Suva on 25 and 26 September 2024, drawing representatives of 12 superannuation, provident and unit trust funds from 11 Pacific countries. Panels ran on each resolution, alongside presentation of the Women in Super manual. The Women in Super Steering Committee then convened the Network’s first event on 19 February, bringing together seven funds from five countries to discuss a follow-up survey to the March 2023 baseline, designed to track implementation and feed a progress update to the 2025 CEO forum.
Sindiwan delivered that update. PNG Haus Bung reported that she presented Women in Super updates at the 2025 PIIF Annual CEOs Forum, hosted by the Fiji National Provident Fund at the Sheraton Fiji Golf and Beach Resort in Suva from 7 to 10 April. nasfund chief executive Rajeev Sharma attended as PIIF Chairman.
The data resolution, half done
Universal collection is the initiative’s clearest result so far, and Sindiwan says so without decorating it.
“While 100% of funds now collect sex-disaggregated data, not all are utilizing it effectively,” she told Exepreneur. Her response is training, aimed at improving data-driven decision-making across member funds.
A fund holding sex-disaggregated data it never analyses knows the size of its own gender gap and leaves the number sitting in a system. Analysis lets it find which employer groups, age bands and contribution patterns are producing the difference, and design around them. Sindiwan’s stated ambition pushes past analysis into disclosure.
“We aim for all PIIF member organizations to consistently collect and utilize sex-disaggregated data in their reporting,” she told Exepreneur.
Reporting is the demanding word in that sentence. Once a fund publishes its own male and female balance comparison, the number is in front of its board, its regulator and its members every year, and the following year’s number gets compared to it.
The members who have no employer
Sindiwan is direct about how far the informal economy work has actually travelled.
“We are committed to developing innovative approaches to include workers from the informal sector in superannuation systems,” she told Exepreneur, pointing to flexible contribution plans and digital platforms. She said the progress funds had made through outreach surprised her, then added that “challenges such as regulatory constraints and limited banking access remain.”
The population outside the system is substantial and disproportionately female. The Asian Development Bank’s Pacific brief states that it is mainly women who work in the region’s informal economy, generally in low productivity jobs with limited scope to accumulate capital or skills. PSDI has published a report series on the subject, the first of them titled Invisible Hands: Enabling Pacific Women in the Informal Economy. A peer-reviewed study of retirement planning among informal workers in Fiji found 69 percent of the market vendors it surveyed were women, which the authors attributed to women making up the majority of vendors.
Consider what a market vendor in Suva or Lae actually presents to a superannuation fund. She has income. She has no employer to remit on her behalf, no predictable monthly figure to remit, and in many cases no bank account to remit from. Each of those is a separate engineering problem, and the Women in Super response, as Sindiwan described it, takes all three: flexible contribution plans built for irregular income, mobile banking for members without branch access, and community-led outreach.
“We’re conducting campaigns to educate informal workers about the importance of saving for retirement,” she said.
nasfund already sells into this segment. The fund’s own positioning names farmers, sole traders and small business owners as target members for voluntary savings.
Literacy, and the limits of literacy
Retirement literacy is the third resolution. Women in Super plans to roll out programs tailored for Pacific women, and Sindiwan frames the goal as capability rather than awareness.
“These initiatives will equip women with the knowledge and confidence to make informed decisions about their retirement income,” she told Exepreneur.
PSDI’s diagnostic identified limited outreach to women as potential members among the institutional causes of the gap, which places part of the failure on the supply side. Raising demand among women who still cannot easily reach a fund produces informed non-members.
The argument about culture
Sindiwan’s position on delivery is that none of the above survives contact with Pacific communities if it arrives as an import.
“As Pacific people, we are deeply rooted in our culture and traditions,” she told Exepreneur. “It is crucial to acknowledge our traditional landowners and cultures, as they unite us and shape our values.”
Her case is that building Indigenous knowledge into how superannuation is explained and delivered is what earns community trust, and that trust is the operating requirement for a product asking people to surrender money for three decades before they can touch it. There is a governance argument underneath the cultural one. PIIF’s own CEO forum wrote the resolutions, fund employees staff the working group, and its chair is a PNG marketer whose working life consists of persuading Papua New Guineans to lock away money they could spend this week.
What has not been demonstrated
Three things about the initiative remain unproven, and Sindiwan’s own account acknowledges each.
Collection is universal. Use is not, on her own evidence, and no PIIF member has yet published a fund-level comparison of male and female balances showing movement in the outcome the initiative exists to change.
Regulatory barriers sit outside the funds’ reach. PSDI named sector and small-business exemptions and restrictions on voluntary membership, and those are legislative questions across twelve separate jurisdictions. PIIF can advocate for amendment. It has no power to legislate one.
Informal sector inclusion remains at pilot stage. Flexible contributions, mobile banking access and community outreach are described throughout as approaches under development, without reported participation numbers attached to any of them.
The test that settles it is whether the follow-up survey shows movement on use rather than collection, and whether any of the 20 member funds publishes its own gender balance comparison in an annual report. Sindiwan has already named the standard she wants to be measured against, and it is a disclosure standard.
“We aim for all PIIF member organizations to consistently collect and utilize sex-disaggregated data in their reporting,” she told Exepreneur.
