One year.
Ten languages.
This is Umeed Limited's first full year of operations, told in the organisation's own numbers: what the platform holds, what it survived, and what it still cannot do. Where something is delivered, we say so. Where it is only a plan, we say that too.
A design problem,
not a translation problem.
Hong Kong's safety net is genuinely comprehensive: housing support, public healthcare, subsidised school places, legal aid and employment protection are all real and available. For a substantial part of the population, however, almost none of the information describing these entitlements is written in a language they can read — a barrier our families encountered when we arrived in this city.
What fails is the last few metres — the gap between a policy that exists and a parent who can discover it, understand what it requires, and act on it before a deadline passes. We regard that gap as a design problem rather than a translation problem, and for a long time it has been treated as no organisation's particular responsibility.
We received an award from the University of Hong Kong in April. While we believe awards are lovely, the work is the point, and that remains an accurate summary of how we regard this year. The platform is live, it is free, it operates in ten languages, and we know precisely what it still cannot do.
— Statement from leadership, 2025/26 Anniversary Report
Executive team
Singh Karndeep
Chief Executive Officer
Kaur Sursharan
Chief Business Development Officer
Bibi Hajirah
Chief Strategy Officer
Gurung Suhani
Chief Operating Officer
Elbeshlawy Malak Ahmed Farouk
Chief Marketing Officer
Appointed May 2026. Umeed Connect was co-founded by four ethnically diverse young people who grew up in Hong Kong; the volunteers who maintain its content are university students, recruited afresh each term.
What the
platform holds
As at August 2026, Umeed Connect is live, free, and published territory-wide in ten languages. Core features require no registration. The figures below are the platform as it actually is, not as it is planned to become.
Live items
Across four content types: notices, guided journeys, verified resources and original editorial.
Government notices ingested
From GovHK between 8 December 2025 and 22 August 2026 — a mean of 9.42 per day.
Verified resources
Across five populated categories: Housing, Education, Lifestyle, Support Services and Employment.
Guided journeys
155 steps in total, 100% translated across all ten languages at journey and step level.
Stories published
30,697 words of original English editorial, carried into 431 published language versions.
Median time to live
From ingestion to publication in all ten languages. Fastest recorded: 7.7 minutes.
Live within 24 hours
90.6% are live within 48 hours; 90th percentile is 46.11 hours.
Languages, live
English, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Bengali, plus two romanised variants.
When Typhoon Noul hit,
the platform got faster.
Over 25–26 July 2026, Typhoon Noul brought Hong Kong to a stop. Across those two days the platform published 46 notices, every one complete in all ten languages, of which thirteen carried the urgent flag — school closures, the closure of the China Ferry Terminal, shelter openings, country-park and beach warnings, and Labour Department rules on working during a typhoon signal, published as one coordinated multilingual set rather than a series of isolated alerts.
3.21h
Median time to live during Typhoon Noul
Roughly four times faster than the 12.69-hour corpus median.
7.69h
Black Rainstorm, 8 June 2026
21 notices, all in ten languages.
117
Scam, fraud and phishing warnings
Republished in all ten languages, covering fake bank sites, a fake FPS refund page, and fake Octopus and government pages.
Government notices,
by type
The largest and least visible part of the platform is its government-notice feed, which mirrors public-information notices issued by the Hong Kong government and republishes them in all ten of the platform's languages. Health and Service together make up 62.3% of the corpus — this is a routine public-information channel, not only an emergency siren.
2,421 notices total, 8 December 2025 – 22 August 2026. Translation coverage: 92.15% complete in all ten languages across the whole corpus; 99.55% since the 19 December 2025 language cutover that added Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog and Bengali. English is 100% throughout.
What happened
this year
30 December 2025
Fire safety training
Umeed's first act as an organisation was not a product launch. Delivered with the Institute of Leadership and Management Foundation Limited (ILM), with instructors from FirexFire HK, every participant had the opportunity to use a fire extinguisher.
24 January 2026
Community Connect beta launch
More than 40 residents attended the first Community Connect event at the Khalsa Diwan Sikh Temple Digital Library. The platform was demonstrated live, marking its beta launch, and the first round of user acceptance testing ran inside the event: 13 users, five youth and eight parents of diverse race.
27 January 2026
Contributors Community induction
Post-secondary student volunteers from across six ethnicities came together to understand the project and the platform's usage, in an open dialogue that produced constructive feedback.
14 & 21 February 2026
Connect Co-Creation Hackathon
Four workshops, eight hours of content, across two Saturdays at Dream Impact. Open to ages 12–28, no coding experience required. 53 participants attended against a target of 45; all three outcome targets were met, each against a 70% threshold.
21 March 2026
語MEED at the HKSEC
語MEED, Umeed's GenAI Chinese and Cantonese tutor, reached the Top 8 of over 270 teams at the Hong Kong Social Enterprise Challenge and won the Best Presentation Award (Group B) in the Semi-Finals.
25–26 March 2026
Cyber attack repelled
Malicious actors attempted to attack connect.umeed.hk. No data was compromised and no unauthorised access was achieved. A formal incident report was shared with the Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team (HKCERT).
14 April 2026
Letter to the South China Morning Post
The SCMP published a letter by CEO Singh Karndeep, "Engage with ethnic minority grass-roots platforms", in response to the paper's report on Equal Opportunities Commission and University of Hong Kong research into the hurdles official apps pose for ethnic minority groups.
26 April 2026
CEDARS HKU award
The University of Hong Kong's Centre of Development and Resources for Students gave Umeed Connect its Distinguished Service to the Community Award at the University's 29th Recognition Ceremony.
30 April 2026
Incubation closes, every target met
293 registered users against a target of 150; 10,258 resource views against 5,000; seventeen student volunteers against a target of five. Having committed to translating into two languages, Umeed delivered ten.
May 2026
Executive team appointed
A five-person executive team was appointed, alongside a sustained programme of performance, cost and security engineering, and a written plan for the organisation to cover its own running costs.
Meeting the community
before asking for trust
Umeed's first act was a fire safety class, not a product demo. We chose to meet the community in person before asking anyone to trust a website, and it remains, in hindsight, the right sequence to have followed. Three programmes ran between December 2025 and February 2026.
30 December 2025
Fire safety training
A residential fire safety training session delivered in partnership with ILM, with instructors provided by FirexFire HK. The content addressed how fire safety equipment works within a home, rather than the industrial safety training more commonly delivered in workplace settings, and every participant had the opportunity to use a fire extinguisher rather than simply observe a demonstration of one.
24 January 2026
Community Connect beta launch
More than forty residents attended: parents, students and people who had come directly from work. Two panellists spoke, Harman Preet Singh Bhatti, CPA, Senior Associate at PwC, and Umair Mehmood, Assistant Program Director at HKPAPA. The event served three functions at once: a community meeting, the platform's beta launch, and the first round of user acceptance testing.
14 & 21 February 2026
Connect Co-Creation Hackathon
The year's largest programme, run across two Saturdays at Dream Impact. No coding experience was required — a condition of the design, since the brief asked for unique digital solutions to information poverty in employment and education pathways, and the expertise that brief needs is lived rather than technical. Every team presented its solution to the room.
What Umeed Connect
actually does
Each feature is presented in turn because it addresses a distinct barrier a user might otherwise meet: finding a service, following a process, or acting on time-sensitive information.
Chiri — text
Live · 8 + 2 languages
An AI assistant that answers from human-vetted resources already on the platform rather than open-ended generation. Every answer carries a disclaimer, and a set of crisis keywords stops the conversation outright and routes the user to professional support instead of attempting an answer.
Chiri — voice
Live · 8 languages
Hong Kong's first voice-to-voice AI chatbot for ethnically diverse individuals. A person speaks a question aloud and is answered aloud, removing reading and typing entirely for users with limited literacy in any written option.
Guided journeys & pathways
Live
Administrative processes that defeat people — eHealth registration, public housing, Primary One admission — broken into ordered steps with the documents required at each stage, in the user's own language. Every step links to its official source.
Resource directory
Live
Verified services across nine topic categories, five currently populated: Housing, Education, Lifestyle, Support Services and Employment. Every entry is reviewed before listing — 116 of 145 records reviewed were approved.
Umeed Stories
Live
The platform's editorial and news surface, presenting material through tag filters. It carries longer-form content than a directory entry allows, for readers looking to understand a topic rather than complete a specific task.
Notices
Live
Time-sensitive public information on the homepage itself: live weather warnings, official scam alerts and health advisories — items whose usefulness collapses within a day or two.
For You
Live
Recommendations based on the user's age group.
Legal Hub
Pending legal resources vetting
Legal information and the services that provide it.
WhatsApp broadcast
Built, already in use
Segmented audiences, message templates, link tracking and campaign analytics — built in-house and portable to client work.
Translation pipeline
Live
Government notices are ingested on a three-hourly cycle and published in all ten languages at a median of 12.7 hours, with 72.7% live within 24 hours. The residual delay is human review, not machine translation: only four administrator accounts currently clear notices for publication.
Map
Retired
Location-based resource discovery.
Borrowed trust,
held carefully
A family deciding whether to act on information about a clinic, a school place or a housing application is not assessing a website so much as asking who stands behind it. Umeed held no such standing of its own at the start of the year; what standing the platform has since acquired was lent to it by organisations the community already knew.
Funded by
The first six months of structured delivery were funded by the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund (SIE Fund) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, delivered through the Impact Innovation Lab at MakerBay Foundation, which incubated project MB-08-031 from 1 November 2025 to 30 April 2026.
Intention,
stated precisely
Where an activity has already taken place, it is identified explicitly as delivered; where it has not, it is described as a plan. A reader should be able to tell, at every point, what already exists and what remains to be built.
Repositioning as a parent company
Umeed Limited is repositioning as a parent company working in media, branding and digital solutions, with Umeed Connect as its flagship social product. Every commercial capability the organisation holds — multilingual architecture across five writing systems, a translation pipeline, a WhatsApp broadcast tool, and a voice agent — was built for this community first and is portable to client work. Selling that capability to other organisations is the model intended to keep the platform free; it has not yet produced a client engagement.
The two-year plan to form Umeed Foundation
Our position today should be stated precisely: Umeed Limited is a private company limited by shares. It is not a registered charity, it holds no section 88 tax-exempt status, and donations made to it are not tax-deductible. Over roughly the next two years, the intention is to establish the Umeed Foundation as a separate charitable vehicle, so that community programmes sit within a charity while commercial work remains within the company.
What is sought now
What is currently sought is grants, sponsored pilots and paid workshops received by Umeed Limited. No tax deduction is available to donors today, and this limitation is stated directly here rather than left for a funder to discover later. All income is received by the company, and no income goes to any individual.
A mobile application
The platform currently lives only on the web: without internet connectivity, it is inaccessible. A full native application would store data offline on the user's phone, removing the connectivity barrier entirely.
Support this project語MEED — capital or incubation
A GenAI Chinese and Cantonese tutor for non-Chinese-speaking students, addressing the distance between what HKDSE and GCE examinations demand and what the school day assumes.
Support this projectShow everyone who made this year possible
Umeed Connect advisors
- Adnan Muhammed
- Frank Ng
- Luisa Tan Castro (Nadia)
- Manoj Dhar
- Rishi Narang
語MEED advisors
- Dr. LAM Ho Cheong 林浩昌
- Prof. Puja Kapai
Contributors Community (volunteers)
- Archi Jain
- Arshad Ahleena
- Bibi Sidra
- Fatima Hasna Hameed
- Gabrielle Termulo
- Gurung Rijohn
- Gurung Sanjog
- Jessika Pal
- Kanak Khanuja
- Kaur Ramanjot
- Kaur Surachna
- Olly Carter Manson
- Penas Hannah Kaye Ramiento
- Rahman Fatema Elisa
- Rana Muhammad Ahmed
- Sandhu Anmol Singh
- Sandhu Jashandeep Singh
- Singh Sharanjit
- Satpal Singh