Foreword

It gives me great pleasure to launch Hong Kong’s Ethnic Minority Scholarship Directory (Private & International Schools).

Hong Kong’s Private and International Schools offer some of the best education available globally at both the primary and secondary level. Most of these schools operate in English and offer globally accepted curriculum. All have been granted permission to operate as schools by the Education Bureau and many have been given free land by the HKSAR government. As part of their land leases, many have agreed to giving a certain percentage of places to financially deserving students. We hope this Directory helps outreach to those Hong Kong students in financial need.

On the flip side, Hong Kong has one of the greatest Gini coefficients in the world. This means that we have a large gap between the rich and the poor and in the case of ethnic minorities one in four live in poverty. Given that 96% of Hong Kong’s population is made up of ethnic Chinese, it makes sense that the vast majority of public schools operate in Cantonese. This is a problem though for the South Asian population, where 87.8% of them speak English as their usual spoken language but only 40.5% speak Cantonese.2

The aim of this Scholarship Directory to put the supply of scholarships that Private and Internationals schools have to offer in one place so that English speaking ethnic minorities who qualify for scholarships are able to easily access them.

The Zubin Foundation’s outreach to the ethnic minority community is wide and we look forward to many of them applying to some of the best Private and International Schools in Hong Kong, receiving a world class education with a scholarship and meeting their full potential.

Thank you to all the schools that participated and Swire Trust for their support.

Shalini Mahtani

Founder and CEO, The Zubin Foundation

2 Census and Statistics Department, ‘Thematic Report: Ethnic Minorities’ (2016 Population By–census, December 2017), Table 4.5, Proportion of ethnic minorities aged 5 and over(1) able to speak selected languages/ dialects by ethnicity, 2016, https://www.statistics.gov.hk/pub/B11201002016XXXXB0100.pdf

Photo from 2019 Ethnic Minority Scholarship Fair with over 120 attendees