September 30 is International Translation Day - a day that is very important to us at StoryWeaver. 

For children to become readers, they must have access to books in the languages they speak and understand. Yet, this is sorely lacking in several parts of the world — there are not enough books, in not enough languages for children to learn and practise reading. A UNESCO study states that 40% of the world does not have access to education in their mother tongue. 

In September 2015, Pratham Books set up StoryWeaver with the aim of addressing this scarcity of books for children. StoryWeaver was launched with 800 books in 24 languages. Today, just 6 years later, the platform offers over 38,000 books, and our language footprint has grown to 303 languages - 60% of these languages are indigenous.

In the coming days, we shall share more insights about the guiding principles that have helped us nurture an ecosystem to address the dearth of children’s books in mother tongue languages.

We want to say a big thank you to our wonderful translation community, our partners and collaborators that have helped us grow and learn on this journey to the 300 languages milestone on StoryWeaver. Here’s to more storybooks in more languages, so that more children around the world can experience the joy of reading!

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StoryWeaver, is an open source digital repository of multilingual stories for children from Pratham Books launched in 2015, that hosts 53K storybooks in ~330 languages today. In 2020, StoryWeaver was India’s first recognised Digital Public Goods for Foundational Literacy and Early Grade Reading in 2020. This year, we were reviewed by Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) and found to be a digital public good in alignment with the Digital Public Goods Standard for the third year in a row!

The Digital Public Goods Standard, requires a project to be an open-source software, with open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm by design and are of high relevance for attainment of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  

The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, working to accelerate the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.

StoryWeaver is one of the 36 DPGs recognised by the alliance that are working towards Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, and as such is available on the digital public goods registry alongside other open source projects that are meaningfully contributing to bringing about quality education in the world.

Through the power of collaboration, technology and open licensing, StoryWeaver seeks to provide children with the very first step in their reading journey - storybooks. Our approach to creating book security is three-pronged: creating storybooks, enabling open access to these books and providing free resources to encourage the use of these books to help children read.

For almost a decade now, StoryWeaver has been publishing books under open licences. We are one of the world’s largest platforms for children’s books in mother tongue languages. As India’s first vetted digital public good for early reading, we are extremely delighted to be recognized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance for three consecutive years.  Initiatives such as the DPGA have provided the much needed spotlight and conversation around the urgent need for public digital goods to help solve societal problems.

-Purvi Shah, Senior Director, Pratham Books StoryWeaver

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This Children's Day, Pratham Education Foundation and StoryWeaver are delighted to announce their partnership to add to the repository of reading resources to help build foundational reading skills among young children. The announcement is the start of a process in which stories developed by teams from Pratham Education Foundation will be hosted on StoryWeaver. Having these storybooks under the CC BY 4.0 license on StoryWeaver makes them available to a larger audience worldwide, and the books are free to read, download and use. At the same time, these books will give the StoryWeaver community new stories to translate, giving children around the world access to more books in their own languages.

To kick off the collaboration, 50 stories from Pratham are being launched on StoryWeaver today.  These books will be part of StoryWeaver's new collection for Emergent Readers, which are storybooks with simple text, colourful illustrations and familiar words, to help introduce children to the #JoyOfReading! 

Explore the storybooks here:  https://bit.ly/38DUe25

While most of these 50 storybooks are in Hindi, the partnership aims at building a collection of 200 books in 11 Indian languages and English in the next two months, and scaling the repository to 1000 books in the coming months. The languages include Assamese, Bangla, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

The first 5 years of a child’s life  are crucial, with over 85% of brain development occurring at this stage. Fostering reading and development abilities at this stage has a positive impact on learning outcomes, and preparing children for school. At present, millions of children do not have access to quality Early Childhood Education. In keeping with United Nations’ SDG 4  - Quality Education for All, the National Education Policy 2020 has laid out a blueprint for the universal provisioning of quality early childhood development, care and education. The key priorities of the National Education Policy 2020 include the achievement of Foundational Literacy for all primary school students by 2025, and the creation of enjoyable, inspirational books for children.

Suzanne Singh, Chairperson, Pratham Books, says: ​ “Children’s Day serves as an important reminder of our responsibilities towards nurturing our children to achieve their potential. We are delighted to partner with Pratham and leverage the power of open licensing, to address the inequity in the availability of storybooks for emergent readers. Pratham’s vast experience with early learning is reflected in the content produced by them and we are delighted to make this content available to the rest of the world so that children have the opportunity to learn to read, and read to learn.”

Rukmini Banerji, Chief Executive Officer, Pratham Education Foundation, says: “We, at Pratham, have long believed that for learning to read and for loving to read, children must have easy access to a wide variety of stories at all times. We love stories and use stories extensively in our programs. Since StoryWeaver was born, we have been big admirers and users of StoryWeaver. We are also producers of stories. Every year we also generate a lot of stories ourselves in many regional languages for use in our own programs. Thus, the new partnership with StoryWeaver enables us to share our stories with a wider audience and to add to the growing repository of reading material that is available to children in India and across the world. Our collaboration with StoryWeaver is yet another step towards the dream of every child in India reading a story every day.”

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