Pratham Books StoryWeaver has received a grant from Google.org, which has announced a $8.4-million grant to four Indian NGOs. This commitment from Google’s philanthropic arm will help the four NGOs scale over the next two years and make quality education a reality to everyone.
“Access to learning and information is a part of our core values at Google”, said Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Education Lead, Google.org.
These grants are part of a global $50 milliohn commitment which aims to help non-profits working in the education space apply tech-based learning solutions.
According to a report in Hindustan Times, Google.org has said that the grants will focus on quality learning materials, providing better training and support to teachers and supporting students beyond classroom learning.
Of this, StoryWeaver, created by Pratham Books has received $3.6 million. The other three NGOs to receive the grant are Learning Equality, Million Sparks Foundation, Pratham Books StoryWeaver and Pratham Education Foundation.
Pratham Books says it will massively scale the creation of multilingual early reading material with funding and technical support from Google.org. It also aims to expand distribution and access to the platform by building technology driven features. There will also be a focus on improving the translation experience on the platform and Pratham Books will have access to Google’s expertise in this domain.
In the 18 months since its launch, StoryWeaver has grown from a digital repository of 800 stories in 24 languages to one with over 3100 stories in 67 languages of the world. The stories have been read about 1 million times and downloaded over 100,000 times.
According to HT, Pratham Education received $3.1 million for their Hybrid Learning Programme to empower students to use self-driven, tablet-based curricula to learn outside of the classroom.
Million Sparks Foundation that developed ChalkLit, a digital content platform and social community for teachers received $1.2 million.
Learning Equality received $500,000 for India as part of the $5 million across India, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa. The organisation aims to take digital content offline for students without internet through their open-source software Kolibri.