Following his ground-breaking success at promoting family planning and HIV prevention in the seventies, eighties and nineties, Mechai Viravaidya approached the problem of rural poverty by empowering the poor through a partnership between rural villages and private companies and in 2008, he established the Mechai Bamboo School in the rural Northeast of Thailand to serve as a model to re-engineer rural education. It is a boarding school which aims to foster a new generation of rural youth who are honest and innovative social entrepreneurs and community development leaders. Today, with the help of the private sector, the Bamboo School is assisting over one hundred small rural schools to adopt this concept.

Faye Yung graduated with a PhD in Education from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interest in multicultural children’s literature and her teaching experience in secondary and tertiary level continuously inform her commitments in various educational projects in Hong Kong and Cambodia. She has been volunteering at Project Little Dream since 2012. She currently heads the Education Division, responsible for curriculum development, teacher training, literacy research and library establishment. While continuing her research work, she currently works in a Hong Kong NGO on a project to promote digital literacy among underprivileged youth in developing countries. She is also Assistant Professor of The Open University of Hong Kong.