ReadAble

Empowering children, through communities, by providing structured and sustainable reading programmes. 

Literacy. The magnitude of the problem is such that half of 15-year old Malaysians are unable to read. Malaysia ranks in the bottom ~10% of all countries for reading according to PISA 2012 results. The 2010 UNESCO Report: The Social and Economic Impact of Illiteracy, outlined the following impact as result of illiteracy being perpetuated: increased likelihood of dropping out of school, high-risk sexual behaviour, serious employability issues, low awareness of rights and civil liberties and intergenerational illiteracy.

For a brief period of time after I left my teaching stint in a low performing secondary school, I returned to the legal industry and volunteered my time offering legal aid on weekly basis. It was through this experience of interviewing long lines of persons apprehended on charges of substance abuse, street violence and petty theft. It was challenging to get them to spell their names. It was quite clear that they were illiterate. It broke my heart that they were very young – in their early 20s. I saw my students in them. There must be something we could all do. And that was the reason why my friends and I got together to create a movement to rid Malaysia of illiteracy.  

We help the many illiterate students in our country learn to read in English using a structured, research-based programme. We work to empower teachers, parents and on-the-ground movers through providing a comprehensive effective literacy toolkit, training and long term support, and workshop for parents and teachers.

As illiteracy is a wicked problem, it is difficult to target intervention on students solely and expect transformation without engaging the other stakeholders like the community. A community left disengaged as mentioned above, would perpetuate illiteracy within their circle. Hence, we have structured our programme to include community support as integral component of what we are delivering. Because at the end of the day, who can ever know if the cure to cancer, the reversal of climate change, the solution to global hunger lies in the minds of children who can't read at present? This is why we believe in our work. We are changing the world, one reader at a time. 

We pride ourselves in crafting a system to sustain student motivation in this remedial programme. As with most remedial programmes, student motivation generally decline midway of the programme. We have designed trackers to enable teachers to articulate growth in students and help them celebrate small successes to spur the students on. Most assessments which these students are subjected to, are too high-leveled that these assessments fail to capture any growth in the students, despite students improving. Our diagnostics which we have designed is able to capture such growth on  periodical basis. 

We are in the midst of developing an application to identify correct speech. This helps on two grounds:
1. It eases the process of diagnosing students;
2. It can be used by students who are more self-motivated to check own pronunciation and reading fluency. 

Aside from application development, we are drafting literacy modules (expansion from our current set) to address themes of environmental care and diversity. 

We are currently working to expand our support to teachers in the South East Asian region by providing training and literacy toolkits to the Philippines.  

We hope that as our branding and news of our impact grows, our literacy toolkit will help inform the current national curriculum for remedial literacy, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.

We would also hope to work closer with the correction schools across the country in equipping the students to rebuild a life for themselves through education.   

Besides, strong online support, we often provide periodic onground support wherein we would help teachers and community leaders fundraise, rally volunteers to help and to lend technical support and run trainings. 

We are currently serving 50 schools, with 2700 students impacted through our programme (having gone through our programme and diagnosis). To date, we have sold and in distribution, 187 reading kits and 1725 work books in circulation.  

We are projecting a growth of 25% of students benefiting from our programme in the coming year. We have just hired a Programme Specialist to better coordinate programmes across the country, providing a more customised support depending on one's locality and target beneficiary and immediate literacy needs.   

In three years, we would already have collaborated with environmental and civil society lobbying groups to develop our expansion modules to educate people on environmental issues alongside literacy skills. With this expansion pack, we are targeting communities in the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, and the Borneo island communities. 

We come from diverse background: 

1. Linguistics - Technical expertise in the study of English as a language.
2. Legal drafting - Legal compliance and intellectual property protection. This enables us to draft, vet employment and joint-venture contracts.
3. Business Development – Informs business strategy, cost structures and product pricing.
4. Pedagogy - We were all once teachers in low-performing schools with experiences implementing literacy programmes in schools. Our products are well tested to support maximum student outcomes. This support goes beyond mere curriculum, and includes volunteer management, stakeholder engagement, recording impact, and fundraising.

Our revenue is derived from two main sources:
1. Sale of Literacy Toolkit
2. Training of teachers

We have structured the price of our products to include sustainability fee to help the organisation run further. Our strong rapport with the Ministry of Education has also led us to more strategic engagements of training pre-service teachers.  

Our sustainability plan in 3 years is to be adopted by a corporation as a CSR arm. 

Being part of Solve puts us at the forefront of problem solving as we identify potential collaborative partners to amplify solutions to a common social problem - in our case, poverty alleviation through literacy.  Through Solve's panel of experienced advisors, we strongly believe that there is much to learn, in our bid to drive change in our region. We therefore recognise this learning opportunity is one we cannot miss for the sake of our community.

Being affiliated with Solve, would help us gain credibility in eyes of corporations who are intending to seek our services.  

We believe that our products are extremely malleable to local context and cost-friendly which makes it suitable for scalability in resource-tight communities. However, our current gap lies in the lack of an international affiliation which would help us extend our solution to much needed areas beyond our country. Being part of Solve would ease penetration to such communities especially when dealing with intermediary government agencies.