Her legacy is literacy: why this Malaysian lecturer and her students are instilling essential reading skills in vulnerable communities

How did her awakening to educational disparity first come about? Posted to a Felda settlement in Raub in the early 2000s, fresh from her UK studies, Hema encountered something that shattered her assumptions: eleven and twelve-year-olds who couldn’t read.

“I realised that just because you are going to school every day doesn’t mean you're learning," she reflects. “Good attendance doesn't equate to learning.”

This revelation launched decades of work with marginalised communities across continents—refugee children, orang asli, street children in Nepal and transgender youth in India. Each experience reinforced a fundamental truth: literacy determines dignity, understanding and agency.

The statistics behind her work are sobering. An automatic progression system in local schools means children advance through grades regardless of mastery, creating a cascade of educational failure. Some arrive at Projek BacaBaca having never attended school until age nine, yet find themselves placed in Standard 3 classrooms where they cannot recognise basic alphabets.

“It's overwhelming when you see children and young people from disadvantaged populations suffering, not being given the same opportunities just because they’re born into a poor family or to refugee parents. It's not something of their own doing. It's purely circumstantial,” she says of the disadvantages these children face. 

In 2025, Projek BacaBaca received a grant worth RM400,000 from Yayasan Hasanah with plans to scale the programme’s reach and impact in improving literacy amongst the nation’s most overlooked communities. 

“Right now, the hardest decision is how many children we can help. So many children need help, but we have limited resources. Many schools, parents and organisations contact us asking us to include their children. On a daily basis, it's about [deciding] who we keep and who we can help. Every day I'm painfully aware that there are so many more who need our support."

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Currently, there are 200 children enrolled in Projek BacaBaca this year alone. “The strength of Project BacaBaca has always been that one-to-one pairing—one volunteer or one reading coach to one child. It is labour intensive. This year we're working with 200 over students, which means we’re looking for more than 200 volunteers. But I want to keep that format because that is the reason behind the programme’s success.”

In 2025, the programme pivoted slightly, expanding to children in hospital with long-term or chronic illnesses. Being out of school for a long period of time, these children tend to miss out on basic educational opportunities and get left behind. 

“We’re working with a nephrology department in Penang Hospital. We brought in a couple of students who are on long-term dialysis, which means they can’t go to school. They missed out on a big chunk of their schooling and we’re helping them with reading as well as giving joy through reading. Hopefully, reading gives them joy and helps them regain a small part of their childhood that they lost.”

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Her response remains unwavering: the pursuit of that spark, that moment of breakthrough when understanding dawns and a child’s eyes light up with possibility.

“With Projek BacaBaca, we work directly with the students,” she explains. “The Night School Project, by contrast, is about upscaling the teachers. Many teachers in refugee schools are refugees themselves who have probably gone through disrupted schooling because of conflict in their country or other issues. Or they might already have university degrees, but not in teaching. We provide a long-term training for these teachers, incorporating elements of pedagogy, assessment, curriculum and even trauma-informed teaching,” she says.

“Many of these teachers carry a lot of trauma themselves and the students carry a lot of trauma too. So, how do you still deliver quality teaching when you face these issues? It's not as straightforward as going into a regular classroom and teachinging. The end goal with both projects is always about delivering quality education for children from disadvantaged populations. Literacy is fundamental, and every child wants to be and needs to be acknowledged. 

“When a child can't read or understand what they're reading, it affects so many things int heir lives. It affects their understanding of the world, themselves, their dignity and their rights. So many parents from underprivileged households are busy with other things—putting food on the table or just surviving. Children don't necessarily get enough attention, recognition or time to focus on reading. When a volunteer phones this child and sits with them for even 30 minutes a week, they finally have somebody who is looking out for them; someone who says ‘I'm here for you. I see you. It’s ok if you can’t read this, let’s read it together.’ That makes so much of a difference.”

Underlying the success of the programme is the collective effort of the volunteers, tenacity and a great deal of patience. Hema often advises her students of the value of patience, as the kind of educational breakthroughs that Projek BacaBaca aims for rarely happen overnight. “And I always tell them, give it time. Teaching takes time. Results take time.”

For Hema and her team at Projek BacaBaca, the mathematics are still haunting—choosing whom to help whilst knowing countless others wait. Yet each small victory validates her conviction: education remains the most powerful equaliser.

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