How one Hong Kong NGO opens doors for ethnic minority youth
- Integrated Brilliant Education Limited focuses on Cantonese education for low-income, non-Chinese speaking pupils
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Integrated Brilliant Education Limited students and their family members stand in front of Wuhan’s Yellow Crane Tower. Photo: HandoutA group of 16 Hong Kong students and family members stepped off the high-speed train in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where they were welcomed with a long weekend of delicious food, beautiful sights and fascinating tours as part of a fully-funded cultural immersion learning experience.
Swarup Gurung and Mahisma Gurung participated in the trip. It was the first time both students had visited mainland China, and it was full of surprises.
Mahisma, 14, gushed about visiting Wuhan’s iconic Yellow Crane Tower, while Swarup, 11, said he loved trying the different foods – which he found surprisingly spicy. The group also visited the Bridge Museum, prepared herbal medicine, and rode in electric cars.
The four-day trip, held in April, was organised by Integrated Brilliant Education Limited (IBEL), a Hong Kong-based NGO assisting 280 underserved ethnic minorities in their educational journeys.
Serving underserved communities
Manoj Dhar co-founded IBEL with his wife in 2015 after realising the flaws in Hong Kong’s education system, including the “language-based segregation and marginalisation for [ethnic minorities]”.
Dhar explained that non-Chinese speaking ethnic minorities are at a disadvantage in the city’s school system, particularly low-income families that cannot afford to send their children to international schools. Students who attend local schools are often segregated from their Chinese-speaking classmates because of their lower-level Cantonese.
Dhar established the programme, tailored to ethnically non-Chinese students in underserved communities, to give these youngsters the tools to navigate the Hong Kong educational system successfully. Students attend lessons after school five days a week at one of IBEL’s facilities in Sham Shui Po or Jordan and study various subjects, focusing on Cantonese acquisition.
IBEL also organises outings to get students excited about their city: “Whether we are taking them to museums [or] the Hong Kong Sevens, or giving them sporting activity exercises, we are constantly looking to explore how [to] prioritise the child,” Dhar said. “How do you make the child get something more out of life than what life has given them?”
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Cultural immersion
Dhar, alongside sponsoring stakeholder and supporting organiser Joseph Chan, Chairman of Silk Road Economic Development Research Centre, arranged the first IBEL Wuhan trip in August 2023, taking a group of about 20 people to the city.
“Instead of staying in school [and learning] ‘Oh, this is how it happened’, you can go to the place and actually experience what happened,” said Swarup, a student at Jordan Road Government Primary School.
Mahisma, a Rosaryhill School student, added: “[It’s more than] seeing news or something on your mobile; we got to experience it. It was really good.”
Dhar also believes in the importance of generational experiences, encouraging students to bring family along on the trip to Wuhan. Mahisma bonded with her elder brother on the trip, while Swarup was lucky enough to be accompanied by his parents. At the end of the trip, they witnessed their son make a bilingual speech in English and Cantonese. He expressed his gratitude to a room full of dignitaries, including Hong Kong’s former chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor.
“How could I not be nervous?” Swarup recounted. “My friends told me to make eye contact ... [but] I had to look at the paper.”
Swarup, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, has been attending IBEL after school for the past two years. Mahisma moved to Hong Kong from Nepal in 2022 and has been attending for a year and a half. They agreed that joining IBEL helped them refine their Cantonese skills.
“My Chinese improved a lot,” Mahisma said proudly. “I’m really happy.”
Swarup added that he sometimes gets “second [or] third place” in his school for Cantonese assessments, thanks to his extra practice at IBEL.
Dhar said his proudest moments were seeing the students’ successes. “When we have kids who come in and say, ‘I got 90 or 100 in Chinese,’ you can see that girl or boy smiling, and continuing to smile, and just having that goofy smile all day.”
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