Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh Bismillahirrahmanirrahim
Mengadap Duli Yang Maha Mulia
Raja Zarith Sofiah Binti Almarhum Sultan Idris Shah, Permaisuri Johor. Ampun Tuanku. 

Adalah patik bagi pihak sekelian yang hadir merafakkan setinggi-tinggi kesyukuran ke hadrat Allah s.w.t. kerana dengan limpah rahmat dan lindungan-Nya, Duli Yang Maha Mulia Tuanku telah selamat sampai ke Pasir Gudang. Patik juga menjunjung kasih serta mengalu-alukan keberangkatan Tuanku ke majlis yang amat bermakna ini. 

Patik dan rakyat sekelian merafak setinggi-tinggi kesyukuran ke hadrat Allah s.w.t. kerana patik serta sekelian rakyat jelata dapat bersama-sama Tuanku dalam majlis ini. Sesungguhnya keberangkatan Tuanku untuk melancarkan Kem CIMB Mozek amat kami sanjungi. 

Ampun Tuanku. 

Patik mohon limpah perkenan Tuanku bagi patik meneruskan ucapan di dalam Bahasa Inggeris. 

Ampun Tuanku. 

My fellow CIMB Foundation trustees
Datin Dr. Noor Azizah Abdul Latif
Tuan Haji Shaharudin Shariff, Director of Johor Education Department
Dato’ Noor Rezan Bapoo Hashim, Trustee of Teach For Malaysia
Dato’ Hamidah Naziadin, CEO of CIMB Foundation
Management and teachers of SMK Taman Scientex and Teach For Malaysia Parents and students
Members of the media
Ladies and gentlemen 

Good morning and welcome. 

First of all, I would like to express my utmost appreciation to Her Majesty Raja Zarith Sofiah for gracing this occasion. Your royal presence here is a testament to your commitment and passion towards education, youth development and national unity, all of which are embodied in the CIMB Mozek Camp project being officiated today. 

Your Majesty, ladies and gentlemen

OXFORD UNIVERSITY-MERDEKA CENTER STUDY 

As you saw from the video, over the past 10 years, CIMB Foundation has empowered communities and changed lives all over the country by providing financial and other CIMB resources to numerous causes across our three pillars – community development, sports and education. 

Earlier this month, as the Foundation marked its 10th anniversary, we announced a recalibration of CIMB Group’s CSR agenda centered on two key changes.

1. A commitment to allocate 1% of our pretax profits to Corporate Social Responsibility programmes, which equates to a trebling of our annual CSR spend to between RM65 million to RM75 million, and
2. The introduction of “diversity and inclusion” as a principle that will cut across all the three pillars and everything that we support. CIMB Mozek is the new flagship programme that epitomises CIMB’s CSR recalibrated. 

CIMB Mozek can trace its origins to a study by Merdeka Center and Her Majesty’s alma mater, Oxford University, on the state of ethnic relations in Malaysia. The study was commissioned by CIMB Foundation last year and the report has been made publicly available. 

Based on extensive survey data, the study concluded rather disconcertingly that Malaysians are living together, but growing apart. The study then went on to analyse other similar work from across the world and posited that it is the intensity of cross- communal contact between people that is the primary determinant of the quality of inter- communal relations. Intuitively, that surely resonates with all of us; if you don’t meet, you won’t know and you won’t understand other communities, cultures and religions. 

Yet, over the years, more and more of our kids are being educated at schools with less and less diversity. More and more of them live in less and less diverse neighborhoods. The Merdeka-Oxford study data also showed that, increasingly, our children tend to keep to friends within their own ethnic groups. This wasn’t how my generation grew up and it is certainly not the basis of the united Malaysian nation that our founding fathers envisaged, nor is it the right foundations for 1Malaysia, “strength in diversity” and other aspirational slogans we desperately want to believe in. 

There is no silver bullet, no quick fix to this problem and it is not just something for the government to deal with. This problem needs collective action of many individuals, NGOs, companies as well as the government, and over many years. At CIMB Foundation, we have decided to step forward by placing diversity and inclusion at the forefront of what we do and pilot the CIMB Mozek Camp.  

Your Majesty, ladies and gentlemen

CIMB MOZEK CAMP

The CIMB Mozek Camp aims to:

1. Increase cross-cultural awareness; and
2. Improve mindsets and desire to collaborate with people from different cultures 

The camp’s learning environment is designed based on the traditional “summer camp” so there are lots of fun and games to make diversity themes powerful and compelling for everyone. 

The camps will first train teachers who, once deemed qualified, go on to teach children who sign up for the camp. We will encourage parents whose kids attend national, vocational or religious schools, and feel their kids haven’t had sufficient exposure to other cultures, to send their kids (for free) to the CIMB Mozek Camp during school holidays. At the end of each camp, we will have taught the children of course, but we will also have trained teachers who then go back to their regular schools better- equipped and able to imbed new tools to blend diversity into their regular classes. 

For this pilot camp at SMK Taman Scientex, we have trained 59 teachers for four weeks and they have begun teaching 543 children for a period of three weeks. We are collaborating with Teach For Malaysia so in this first edition, diversity has been blended in as a key value to be taught alongside English. At the end of the camp, the teachers will return to their schools and we estimate that they will have some impact on 9,000 other children over the next year. 

The CIMB Mozek model for the future will depend on the findings of this pilot camp, but what we have committed to is a proliferation of camps throughout Malaysia, which means many more teachers and children next year and the years to come. We will, of course, be consulting with the Ministry of Education and the government on the details of how we scale CIMB Mozek. The pace and reach of this programme will also depend on how many other schools and partners join us on what we believe will be a long-term programme that will contribute meaningfully to bringing us back on the path to the united multi-racial nation that our founding fathers dreamed for us. 

Your Majesty, ladies and gentlemen 

CONCLUSION 

Each of us carries our own piece of mosaic that represents our ethnicity, culture, racial identity and language. We should be proud of all our different identities that make up Malaysia’s diversity. But we know diversity is double-edged, a potential source of both great strength and great tension. So I believe that all of us then must step forward and help ensure that it is our nation’s strength so that Malaysia is the beautiful mosaic that perfectly blends various colours, shapes and sizes. 

Duli Yang Maha Mulia Tuanku, demikianlah ucapan patik.
Wabillahi taufik walhidayah wasalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Adalah patik dengan segala hormat takzim yang berdatang sembah. Ampun Tuanku.

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