Volunteers breaking cultural barriers

A growing number of young Chinese are visiting Africa as unpaid workers and engaging more with people from countries across the continent. Hou Liqiang reports.

In 2014, a friend told Yin Binbin about the bleak lives of the residents of Mathare, a slum area in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. As he listened, an idea occurred to Yin - then a sophomore at Shandong University in East China - he would volunteer to work in a school in the ghetto.

He never expected that his idea would bind him and children of the slums together for a prolonged period. However, in the past three years, Yin and his peers, mostly college students, have raised more than 300,000 yuan ($43,450) to rebuild two primary schools in Mathare. In addition, a "free lunch" program they launched with a Chinese NGO has helped more than 1,100 children in the poverty-stricken area, which has a population of about 500,000.