Engage with ethnic minority grass-roots platforms

Originally published as an op-ed. Reproduced here for the record.

The report "Official apps pose hurdles for Hong Kong's ethnic minority groups, study finds" (March 26) highlights findings that, for many of us, are not revelations but daily realities. The Equal Opportunities Commission and University of Hong Kong research confirms what we have lived: language barriers, complex registration processes and monolingual services shut out thousands of Hong Kong residents from services they are entitled to.

I applaud the EOC's recommendations. Multilingual platforms, AI-powered translation, simplified registration and community outreach. But these are not aspirational proposals. They are already being built in Hong Kong, by the very communities the report describes.

I am a co-founder of Umeed. The name means "hope" in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. We are a youth-led initiative run by four ethnically diverse young people raised in Hong Kong. We did not need a survey to identify the problem. We have lived it, translating hospital forms for our parents and watching our communities excluded from digital services most Hongkongers take for granted.

So we built Umeed Connect, a platform serving ethnic minority groups in eight languages: English, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali, Bengali, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, and romanised Nepali and Punjabi.

Our AI-powered pipeline automatically translates government news and service information within hours. Our chatbot (in beta), Chiri, helps users navigate resources, employment and healthcare in their mother tongue. Our voice agent, also in beta, lets users with limited literacy speak to the platform directly.

The report notes only 25 per cent of ethnic minority respondents used the Hospital Authority's "HA Go" app to book appointments despite 60 per cent having registered. Our "guided pathways" address this. They break down complex processes like eHealth registration or public housing applications into step-by-step instructions with document checklists, in the user's own language. No registration is required for core features.

The EOC recommends building digital skills in communities and schools. We recently organised a hackathon and delivered workshops covering employment and education pathways in Hong Kong. We challenged participants to build digital solutions tackling education and employment barriers faced by ethnic minority communities.

Hong Kong does not need to look to New York for a model. It needs to look at its own young people who are already building these solutions. What we need is for institutions to engage with grass-roots platforms rather than commissioning further studies on problems that already have working solutions.

The tools exist. The communities are building them. Will the institutions meet us halfway?