VillageApps: a platform to educate underprivileged communities in their mother tongue

Abstract

Illiteracy is one of the biggest development challenges, especially in the developing regions. There are 785M adult illiterates in the world; one in every five people has little or no basic reading skills. Illiteracy poses the following challenges: It limits the ability to understand essential information, it increases unemployment, poverty and it has a negative impact on health. In this study, we present VillageApps -- a framework to educate underprivileged communities in their mother tongue. The paper details the platform, its functionality, and its initial evaluation on a group of 30 school-aged children. Our framework consists of a web and a mobile application; the web application provides an interface to upload content and record its page by page audio translation; the mobile application provides an interface to view each page and simultaneously listen to its audio translation.