We are thrilled to announce that Pratham Books has won the prestigious 2020 Library of Congress Literacy Award, recognizing our responsiveness to the unique needs faced by children during the current unprecedented times, and our efforts over the past few months to spread the joy of reading to children everywhere through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Literacy Awards, originated by David M. Rubenstein in 2013, honor organizations doing exemplary, innovative and replicable work. Collectively, all of these awards spotlight the great efforts underway to promote literacy and respond to the needs of our time. We are honoured to be one of five global winners this year, and the only organization from India to win the award.

As schools around the world closed indefinitely, and demand surged during the pandemic for digital learning resources, it became increasingly important to find new and innovative ways to keep children engaged and curious. Pratham Books created programs that could be used in low-resource environments, including launching the StoryWeaver Learn at Home programme in Hindi and English, adding to the repository of thematic reading lists and audio-visual books in multiple languages on StoryWeaver, and a phone-based dial-a-story programme called Missed Call Do, Kahaani Suno! that allowed a child to locate a story in a chosen language by dialing a toll-free number.

In addition, in just four months, translators on StoryWeaver translated 3,000 books into 28 new languages, including books about the coronavirus, health and hygiene and social and emotional issues. UNESCO and the World Bank have listed StoryWeaver as a resource for the homebound child during the pandemic.

We are grateful to our wonderful network for helping us share the joy of reading during these challenging times, and to the Library of Congress for this recognition.

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Reading is one of the most essential components of a child's learning & development journey. At Pratham Books and StoryWeaver, we understand this and StoryWeaver came about with the exact purpose of increasing access to books for children in languages and context that they enjoy - in a boundary-less digital way.

StoryWeaver (http://www.storyweaver.org.in/) is an open source, digital repository of multilingual children’s stories. StoryWeaver is an especially useful tool for organisations and individuals working in Education, allowing them to:

• Browse, read and curate a reading list from over 9700 stories across 122 languages

• Download stories for offline reading

• Create a new story or a set of flashcards from an image bank of over 13000 illustrations

• Re-level or remix a story to suit your child's needs

• Translate stories to a language of your choice

And best of all, ALL of this is absolutely FREE

We invite educators, librarians and resource people to attend the StoryWeaver workshop to be held in Hyderabad. To celebrate the diversity of languages we have, we are planning to conduct the workshop session in English on the 29th of November and in Telugu on the 30th of November. You are requested to give your preference for the date/language while signing up and we will confirm the final date and the venue of the workshop to you at a later stage. However, just in case we have lesser number of participants for the Telugu workshop, we will be looking at doing a bilingual one on 29th itself. Please do make a note of this.

(Image from 'A Book for Puchku' by Deepanjana Pal and Rajiv Eipe.)

The workshop would cover the following:-

1. A detailed Demo of StoryWeaver – how to navigate and use the platform

2. Examples of how educators are using StoryWeaver effectively in their classrooms

3. Dedicated work time for participants to try their hands on StoryWeaver

4. An opportunity to meet other educators and make interesting conversations

If this excites you, REGISTER HERE   to book your place in the workshop, latest by 22nd November, Thursday.  

Please note that the seats are limited and we might not be able to accommodate more than 2-3 people per organization.  Confirmed participants will get a separate email confirming their participation and other logistical details. 

The workshop will be held between 9.30 a.m to 4.30 p.m and there is no fee to attend the workshop.

Feel free to reach out with any questions to Khyati at [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you there!

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Pratham Books (www.prathambooks.org) is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India. As a publisher serving every child in India, Pratham Books has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to exploring innovative ways in which to create access to joyful stories and have been fortunate in finding partners to collaborate with who share this vision.

In 2015, Pratham Books' increased its footprint by going digital. As an industry leader, we were one of the first publishers in the country to open license our content. All this content is now available on StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform are openly licensed.

We are looking for a Data Analyst for StoryWeaver.

We are looking for a Data Analyst who will work closely with our product development team and other internal teams. They will discover the insights within the data sets, and help make smarter decisions to deliver better results for end users.

In this role, the person will be responsible for providing requirements for new features for collection of data, execute data validation checks, ensure data integrity, use statistical techniques to analyse and interpret data, take complete ownership of Google Analytics, identify trends and provide insightful reports to internal and external audience. We’re looking for a self-motivated, detail-oriented individual who loves digging into data, developing insights and communicating data-based recommendations. They will work closely with the internal teams and tech partners to implement recommendations, track the impact and course correct. 

The position will report to the Senior Product Manager of StoryWeaver but also requires working closely with the top management. The person needs to be an out-of-the box thinker and should be a strong believer and propagator of use of open technologies.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work closely with internal product owners to understand the target audience and their motivations, generate the product enhancement, development ideas and requirements docs.

• Perform steps required to create analysis-ready data sets.

• Perform regular data analysis to assess readership, content gap, trends and performances.

• Extracting valuable insight from our data and generating analysis that drives user retention and conversion.

• Build a visualization tool that allows internal users to interactively explore the data and insights.

• Respond to ad-hoc report and analysis requests from other teams as needed.

• Take all data driven features to fruition by working closely with the product development teams.

• Be the bridge between organization and other data-for-good communities. 

Required skills

• Bachelors in Computer Science, Statistics, Market Research, Operational Research, or related quantitative disciplines.

• 2-4 years of experience in the industry

• Experience working with data and analytics.

• Good technical background with some hands-on experience with Python/R, relational databases (PostgreSQL) to perform data analysis.

• Ability to interpret findings through data visualization and delivery of presentations to both internal and external stakeholders.

• Expertise with Google Analytics and common Data Visualization platforms like Tableau, Apache Superset, Google DataStudio etc.

• Strong analytical thought process, ability to extract data and transform it into valuable, actionable insight.

Nice to have but not mandatory:

• Experience working with non-profits.

• Experience with Machine Learning.

Location:

This is a full time position in our Bangalore office.

Compensation:

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Write to us:

Email your resume with ‘Data Analyst- Storyweaver’ in the subject line to [email protected]

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