The following year, she did something no one expected: she returned, not as a student, but as a mentor.

“We’ve seen some students progress four or five years’ worth of reading growth in just one year,” Rachael Francis, CEO of MYReaders, told FMT Lifestyle.

“But what’s even more powerful is when they come back to help someone else. That’s when we know we’ve changed a life.”

What started as a small effort among four passionate “Teach For Malaysia” teachers in 2014, has now grown into an initiative that has impacted over 36,000 students, 2,000 parents, and 1,100 teachers in 144 schools and 67 communities across the country through reading programmes, teacher training, and engaging lessons.

“We empower children through communities. We don’t just teach reading, we create ecosystems of support around the child,” said Francis, 35.

Francis, who joined MYReaders in 2019, recalled a particularly inspiring story about a shopkeeper in a Johor village who became an unexpected hero in the fight against illiteracy. When the MYReaders’ programme needed parent facilitators, she happily volunteered.

“She wasn’t highly educated,” Francis shared, “but she wanted to support the reading of students in her community.”

To that end, this shopkeeper opened her sundry shop to the children in the village, turning it into an informal reading space. “That’s the kind of impact we hope to create.”

At the core of MYReaders is its flagship Literacy Hub, which provides structured English reading intervention through its Literacy Toolkit, which includes a guidebook, 33 decodable books, and 15 comprehension practice books aligned with key reading components.

Designed for teachers of young learners, the step-by-step toolkit is also available for parents to use at home.

“We conduct assessments before and after the programme and we assess students on three skills: word recognition, fluency and comprehension. Based on the assessment, we know what skills the students are missing,” Francis pointed out.

Francis’ own love for literacy began when she was child in Ipoh, where books were scarce in her lower-middle-income home. Still, her parents valued reading and bought her secondhand books from a local shop.

“I grew up being able to read even before preschool. So, my perception is that everybody goes to school, learns how to read and they are able to read,” Francis said.

That perception changed when Francis joined the Heritage Club at St Michael’s Institution in Form 6.

The club ran a literacy programme for 13-year-olds from transition classes who struggled with reading and writing.

“That was my first time actually seeing someone who couldn’t read,” Francis recalled. “It was eye-opening. I realised that not everyone had the same access to books and learning that I did.”

That experience shaped Francis’s mission to close literacy gaps, leading her to “Teach For Malaysia” in 2014 and MYReaders in 2019.

She saw that traditional classrooms didn’t always work for struggling readers, one-to-one mentorship did, a key element in the MYReaders’ module.

“You cannot instruct students on how to read using the classroom style because the reason why they’re already behind is because they don’t recognise the sound of letters and so on. What’s needed are smaller groups or one-to-one pairs.

“And we don’t dictate how much time they spend on each module because the whole point of it all is that students don’t have to go through that whole classroom experience again. It follows their own pace,” Francis explained.

MYReaders extends its impact beyond schools, reaching Orang Asli and refugee communities.

The Juhuk Penanei programme, meaning “Tree of Knowledge” in the Semai language, trains Orang Asli parents as reading mentors, while LitHubX: Literacy for All empowers refugees, migrants and stateless groups with structured reading support.

Looking ahead, MYReaders is expanding its impact, scaling up its Bahasa Melayu literacy programme, already successful in Orang Asli communities.

New partnerships will also help distribute donated books to communities in need, spreading the gift of reading even further.

“Our vision is that one day, every child will be able to read,” Francis concluded.

Find out more about MYReaders here. Follow MYReaders on Instagram.