The need for audacity. And acceleration.
Without it, the world is many decades away from quality education for all.
Here’s a post by Purvi Shah, Director — StoryWeaver, to mark a special milestone: our 5th anniversary
Five years ago, the member nations of the UN adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Much has changed in the past few years. Some situations have improved, and several others haven’t. We are in the midst of a global pandemic that targets the most vulnerable among us. We are also less than a decade away from 2030, that time in the future by which nobody would be left behind.
At Pratham Books and StoryWeaver, we are keenly focused on Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4): Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Where do we stand today? Globally, six out of every ten children are not achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics. In sub-Saharan Africa, 88% of middle school children cannot read properly. In South and Central Asia, 81% of children are not learning the basic minimum. In India, half of children with three years of school cannot read at grade level.
The reasons for these are many. The lack of schools and teachers for the 617 million children who have no access to literacy. A dearth of local language reading material which holds back 40% of students from gaining education in a language they understand. And for children in the global South, little or no access to the closest doorway to literacy acquisition — a book.
Add to this the fact that the Coronavirus crisis has created the largest disruption of education systems in history. Affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries from all continents, the closures of schools and other learning spaces have impacted an incredible 94% of the world’s student population, up to 99% in low and lower-middle income countries.
This elevates the criticality of SDG 4, which was recognised as an urgent need in 2015 itself, to the level of imperative.
We responded to this imperative in 2015. And our response is called StoryWeaver, a digital platform built for scale using open source software. At its core, it is a repository of high quality, openly licensed multilingual storybooks sourced from global publishers, including but not limited to Pratham Books. Every book is available in multiple formats and can be read online, offline or downloaded and printed. Translation and versioning tools help customize the books for localized requirements and these resources become available to other users as well, creating a multiplier effect and amplifying impact. We share an anniversary with the SDGs, so as StoryWeaver turns 5 in 2020, it has grown to hold 25,000 storybooks in over 260 languages.
The need for audacity. And acceleration. Five years ago, we realised that SDG 4 could not be realised in the next 15 years without exponential scale. So we built a platform that would provide access where there was none. Offer quality of the highest standards. Empower partners to use it simply, easily, and quickly. Open the doors to language, ideas, and thinking for millions of children across the world.
Open source allows us to share the best of books freely. Technology allows us to grow and accelerate infinitely. And digital lets us offer children thousands of books today, and millions more tomorrow.
Of diversity and inclusion. The books on StoryWeaver are leveled across 4 reading levels to address the reading needs of primary school age children. All the books are richly illustrated to aid the reading process. The books cover not just a variety of genres and themes but are guided by the core values of equity, diversity and inclusion. The books include early readers, fiction, informational books, books with themes based on science, technology, math, environmental science and books that promote social emotional learning. They champion gender equality, embrace the spectrum of sexual identities, represent minorities, feature differently-abled people and tell stories from different regions and cultures. This provides a robust core of content for other users to translate and version into new languages. 40% of all languages on the platform are minority and indigenous languages.
Building Communities of Practice. As a publisher of high quality children’s books since 2004, Pratham Books has deep experience in developing original content and translating into multiple languages. They captured this experience to develop tool kits, training modules and manuals to share this with organizations and educators who were interested in translating into new languages. They developed a translation sprint workshop model that has been used extensively in many countries to translate books into new languages and it includes a peer to peer review system that aids the quality checking of books that are created. As an example, StoryWeaver’s collaboration with a community based organization, Suchana in West Bengal, India that works with the development of indigenous communities in that region. The communities speak the indigenous languages of Kora and Santali but when the children go to school, they learn in the dominant language of Bengali. With StoryWeaver, they were able to translate over 200+ books into Santali and Kora within a short span of two years. Fuelled by the success of the creating these digital books, Suchana printed 10,000 copies for distribution in local schools.
StoryWeaver has disrupted traditional publishing models that have kept books exclusive & expensive. It has pioneered a new platform approach for book creation and distribution that is taking books to some of the most disadvantaged children globally, particularly in several parts of the developing world that are multi-ethnic and multilingual and where chronic, structural under-investment in the availability of mother tongue reading resources pose a significant barrier to literacy. If we are to meet the 2030 SDGs for education, we have to bring books to children in an accelerated and sustainable manner.
By openly licensing books, providing technology-based tools for translation and versioning, StoryWeaver has not only exponentially increased the availability of quality content but has enabled participation and collaboration to create systemic change, which is benefiting millions of children globally.
The UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, in its report published on June 10th 2019, recommended “that a broad, multi-stakeholder alliance, involving the UN, create a platform for sharing digital public goods in areas related to attaining the SDGs”. Digital Public Goods are defined as open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm and are of high relevance for attainment of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The aim of the Digital Public Goods Alliance is to facilitate the discovery, development, use of, and investment in, openly licensed technologies, data models, and content of high relevance for attainment of the SDGs.
As one of its first tasks, the Alliance identified and vetted a list of digital public goods for foundational literacy and early grade reading, and Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver is one of them.
“We must step up our efforts. Now.” — António Guterres, UN Secretary-General
Visit us at https://storyweaver.org.in/