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

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.