In a recent study UNESCO has advised that all students should be taught in a language that they understand, unfortunately 40% of children globally do not have this luxury. Especially in a country as linguistically diverse as India, children especially from lower income backgrounds face a serious dearth of learning material and books in local languages. Publishers tend to get intimidated by the sheer volume of books they would need to publish in the different languages to effectively solve the problem. Given that a majority of this overlooked population belongs to the lower income section of society, the return on investment for publishers is seen as far too low.

StoryWeaver, created by Pratham Books, is India’s first digital, open source repository of multilingual children’s stories. StoryWeaver provides users with an array of tools to help them read, translate, create, download, share and print content for free.

The repository currently contains over 2200 stories in 52 languages and is available globally. In less than one year the platform has had over 100,000 unique visitors with its stories being read over 200,000 times. Through it’s outreach programs StoryWeaver has impacted another 150,000 children. The organisation estimates it’s readership in one year as 800,000.