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Hong Kong educational charity empowers underprivileged students from ethnic minority groups to ‘compete on an equal level’
- Integrated Brilliant Education Limited provides tutoring at a nominal fee to help students brush up on their Chinese language skills to prepare them for success
- The group was started by husband and wife Manoj and Geetanjali Dhar, who moved to Hong Kong from India in 1999
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Nepalese pupil Noyem Limbu, 10, struggles to speak Chinese, despite taking classes on the subject since kindergarten.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Limbu says his English-medium school in Sham Shui Po only teaches basic Chinese to students, most of whom come from families belonging to ethnic minority groups, mainly from South Asia.
Outside of his Chinese classes, the Primary Five student barely uses the language.
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He speaks English with his classmates, and at home he speaks in Nepali with his parents – his mother a housewife, and his father a food delivery man after losing his job in construction during the coronavirus pandemic. Neither of them speak Chinese.
“I don’t like Chinese,” he says. “I don’t have the chance to use it, and I don’t feel confident to speak in Chinese.”
Like Limbu, many students from ethnic minority groups in Hong Kong have poor Chinese language proficiency. They say they are not receiving the same level of language instruction in school as Chinese students, and lack an inclusive environment in which to practise.
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