IGF 2023 Lightning Talk #11 A book in every child's hand! - Internet & School Education

There are three major problems owing to which children in India aren't reading enough – a very low number of books available, a lack of linguistic diversity of books, and barriers that limit access to the books. With 22 official languages, and hundreds of smaller ones, the multiplicity of languages becomes a challenge for publishers. They prefer to print in the lead languages and ignore the rest. StoryWeaver is an open source platform by Pratham Books for multilingual children's stories. It addresses all the issues around the lack of content by using the open access framework and technology as force multipliers. With over 50000 stories in 335 languages, it is a free gateway to a stream of openly licensed stories in Indian and international languages. The stories can be read, shared, or downloaded for offline usage and in print-ready formats. StoryWeaver is a large digital repository of content and on the other, it can provide tailor made, hyper-local content for a specific need. By making all of this content available for free, StoryWeaver is reducing the barriers to access good quality multilingual content. As a finalist at the Google Impact Challenge in 2013, Pratham Books won a grant to develop the idea that they had presented – which was to build an open source platform with multilingual children’s content. StoryWeaver was launched on September 8, 2015 – International Literacy Day.

Hybrid presentation and event at all the community level in states and with the nonprofits with teachers, govt officials, students and partners.