The Tea Leaf Trust is a UK registered charity (charity number 1123427) committed to:

• Providing education and vocational training to the poorest communities in the mainly tea growing region of Sri Lanka (known as the hill country)

• Promoting ethnic cohesion after 26 years of civil war, through shared educational programmes and resources

A lack of quality education strongly impacts on overall poverty experienced by families working in the tea sector and rural farming communities, enforcing and sustaining the generational cycle of poverty. This ensures a generational dependency on plucking tea and manual cultivation, disempowerment and deprivation of aspiration, all resulting in no opportunity to choose, and the lack of desire to escape.

What the Tea Leaf Trust will provide to these communities?

Our structured educational programmes that focus on teaching English, coupled with the development of professional skills such as I.T. and business skills aimed at the youth of these communities, will provide a strong means of breaking the cycle of poverty by providing opportunities to work away from the tea estates and farms, and earn a wage that will lift families out of poverty.

Our educational projects will promote peace and social cohesion through multi-ethnic learning and a common teaching language, English, to enable children and young adults of all ethnic groups to learn side-by-side, form friendships and develop understanding. English is a crucial language in Sri Lanka. It is the language of business and, therefore, opportunity and opens the way to a brighter future away from the desperate bonded labour of rural farming and the tea estates.