Chief Secretary Chan Kwok-ki will lead a task force to help underprivileged students break the cycle of intergenerational poverty through a one-year scheme aimed at grassroots junior secondary school students.

Chief Executive John Lee today announced he was setting-up the Task Force to Lift Underprivileged Students out of Intergenerational Poverty to be led by the Chief Secretary.

Mr Chan told reporters that addressing the issue of intergenerational poverty requires the joint effort and participation of all sectors of society.

The Government will take the lead in mobilising community resources by promoting tripartite collaboration among the Government, the business sector and the public to support underprivileged junior secondary school students.

Its initial thinking is that the task force will formulate a one-year scheme to target about 2,000 Secondary 1 to 3 students as the first cohort.

“We had different schemes in the past on how to help underprivileged people, but for this one, it will mainly help the secondary students. Most of them are from grassroots families and we want to help them (break) away from intergenerational poverty.”

“This is important. We have to help them. And then, I think, the most important thing is that we need to teach them how to achieve a proper goal in life, how to plan their life, how to achieve their goal and how to make their dreams, step by step, come true. I think this is a very important focus that we are doing now.”

The Government will co-ordinate the scheme, raise donations from the business sector and recruit mentors, in addition to selecting students and pairing each of them with a volunteer mentor.

Volunteer mentors will share their life experience with the students and arrange visits, work shadow schemes or other activities to help the students broaden their horizons and strengthen their self-confidence to enable them to develop their personal goals in a proactive and positive manner. 

Mr Chan added that financial assistance will be provided to the participating students, but their mentor will be the one who decides how the funds are spent, which could include using the money to sign up for courses.

The Chief Executive also announced today the establishment of the District Matters Co-ordination Task Force to be led by Deputy Chief Secretary Cheuk Wing-hing.

Mr Cheuk will lead a number of bureaus and departments to enhance the overall environmental hygiene and cityscape in Hong Kong and build a clean and liveable environment through broad-based community participation.

The Deputy Chief Secretary noted that the task force’s first phase of work is to co-ordinate the launching of a three-month clean-up campaign of hygiene black spots across the city.

In going about its work, the task force will harness the combined strengths of government departments and different sectors of the community.

The task force will review the experience gained in the first phase of work from October and supervise the relevant bureaus and departments to set sustainable action plans, key performance indicators and a system for evaluating the effectiveness of their measures. It will also start work on promoting improvements to the cityscape.

Mr Cheuk said the task force will tackle the issues at root, especially in clarifying the respective departmental responsibilities, rationalising procedures and consolidating government efforts, with the aim of establishing a standard mode of operation for relevant departments to handle similar issues in an efficient and effective manner.

Following the principle of aggregating forces that can be combined and solving problems together, the task force will invite participation from district organisations.

The working group's first meeting will be held next week.