I did not plan to start a business.
In 2023, I was a young education student at the University of the Witwatersrand, studying for my Bachelor of Education and tutoring on the side to pay my way. I taught language and grammar, mostly. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. I assumed that after I graduated I would teach in a classroom, like every other education student I knew.
Then a mother phoned me.
She told me about her son. The little boy was in Grade R, not yet six years old, and his mother wanted to give him something most South African children never get — the chance to truly learn to read before the formal schooling system either built him up or quietly let him down. She had heard I was a patient teacher. Could I work with her son? Could I lay the foundation properly?
I almost said no. I was not a foundational reading specialist. I was qualified to teach language and grammar to older learners, but teaching a Grade R child to read from the beginning is a different skill entirely, and I knew it. I told her honestly that this was not my area, and I was not sure I was the right person.
She asked me to try anyway.
I said yes, and that single yes changed the entire direction of my life.
The First Lesson
I will not forget the first lesson with that little boy as long as I live.
He came to my screen wide-eyed and curious, in that way only small children are. There was none of the bracing I would later learn to recognise in older struggling readers. He was open. He trusted me before I had earned it. The whole world of letters was still new and strange and exciting to him, and he wanted, more than anything, to be let into it.
I knew immediately that I was being given something rare. A clean slate. A child whose relationship with reading had not yet been wounded by the system. A chance to do this properly, from the ground up, the way the research said it should be done.
I went home from that first lesson and started reading. Properly reading — research papers, structured literacy frameworks, the science of reading, everything I could find about how the brain actually learns to decode written language. I went deeper into phonological awareness than my degree had ever taken me. I read about the work being done in countries that had successfully turned their reading outcomes around. I built lesson plans from scratch, designed specifically for him.
And then I taught him. Patiently. Slowly. Sound by sound. We played games. We sang. We laughed. I made sure that every single lesson contained more joy than effort, because that is how young children learn best.
What He Did
Months later, this Grade R child — barely school age — was reading better than every Grade 4 learner I had ever encountered.
I sat back from my screen the day I realised this and just stayed quiet for a long time.
Because what I had stumbled into was not just one child’s story. It was a system-wide truth that nobody seemed to be talking about. Children who are taught reading properly, from the ground up, can read fluently and joyfully by the time they are six. Children who are not taught reading properly are still struggling at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen — through no fault of their own.
The gap between those two outcomes was not intelligence. It was not effort. It was not the family. It was the teaching.
A four-year head start was being thrown away in classrooms across South Africa, every single day, simply because the foundations were not being properly built. And almost no one was teaching reading the way it actually needs to be taught.
What I Saw Next
After that little boy, more parents started reaching out. Some had pre-schoolers like him, who they wanted to give a strong start. But many had older children — Grade 4, Grade 7, Grade 9 learners who had been pushed forward through grade after grade with cracks in their foundation that no one had ever stopped to fix. Children who had been told they were slow. Children who had decided they were stupid. Children who had stopped trying because trying had only ever ended in shame.
I taught those children too. With the same structured, foundational method. With the same patience. With a fierce determination to never, ever make any of them feel small.
And the same thing happened, again and again. Children who had been struggling for years began to read. Teenagers who had hidden their reading struggles for half their lives began to read out loud, with confidence, in our small online groups. Adult learners who came to me for IsiZulu support discovered they could finally read texts they had been avoiding for years.
The foundation could be built at any age. It was just that almost no one was building it.
What Readify Live Became
I started Readify Live a few months after that first realisation. At first it was just me, working from home, taking on a few learners who had heard about my work through word of mouth. I built the curriculum myself. I designed every lesson. I trained every new tutor personally as the small team grew.
Today, in 2026, Readify Live is a registered private company with a team of eight people, six tutors, and over a hundred learners taught since 2023. We teach reading, languages, mathematics, sciences, and humanities to learners from Grade R to matric and beyond. We teach in English, IsiZulu, and Afrikaans. We work with children across South Africa and internationally. We are a multilingual online academy now, but the heart of what we do has never changed.
Our heart is the little boy who, at five years old, showed me what becomes possible when reading is taught properly from the start.
Our heart is every child after him — the early starters and the late starters, the confident learners and the quietly defeated ones, the ones who came to us reading already and the ones who came to us convinced they never would.
Our heart is every learner who has been told they are slow, that they are behind, that they have left it too late, when in truth they have simply never been taught the way they deserved to be taught.
The Belief That Drives Us
I built Readify Live around two beliefs, and they are the beliefs I will protect for as long as the company exists.
The first belief is this: the foundation is everything. Get it right, and a child can be a confident reader by Grade R. Get it wrong, or skip it entirely, and a child can still be struggling at sixteen. The single most important thing we teach is not advanced content — it is the foundation other people overlook.
The second belief is this: it is never too late to start again. Not for the six-year-old. Not for the nine-year-old. Not for the fourteen-year-old. Not for the adult learner studying IsiZulu at university. Not for any human being who wants to learn and has not yet been given the right teaching.
These two beliefs sit together in everything we do. We teach early when we can, because the early years are precious. And we teach late when we must, because no learner should ever be told their time has passed.
A Personal Note
If you are reading this and you are a parent of a young child, please know that the foundation you build now will shape everything that comes after. If your child is in Grade R, Grade 1, Grade 2 — these are the years that matter most for reading. Do not assume school will get it right. Watch. Ask questions. Get support if you need it. The investment you make in foundational reading now will pay back tenfold by Grade 4.
If you are reading this and you are the parent of an older child who is struggling, please hear this from me directly: you have not left it too late. The cracks in the foundation can be filled. The skills can be taught. The confidence can be rebuilt. I have seen it happen, again and again, since the day in 2023 that one mother phoned me and asked me to try.
If you would like to chat about your child, or about yourself if you are an adult learner, please visit us at https://readifylive.co.za/. We would love to meet you.
Thank you for reading. And thank you, especially, to that first mother who phoned me, and to the little boy who taught me what reading can be when it is built properly from the start. Without you both, none of this would exist.
Muskan Umata is the founder and CEO of Readify Live, a multilingual online academy supporting South African learners in reading, languages, mathematics, sciences, and humanities. She holds a B.Ed from the University of the Witwatersrand, is completing a postgraduate qualification in online learning, and has personally taught over 100 learners since 2023.
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