Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, announced an additional grant of $3 million over two years to Central Square Foundation and The Teacher App on Thursday. Central Square Foundation, which focuses on improving early education, will be awarded a grant of $2 million and technical assistance from the YouTube Learning Team for creating high quality curriculum-aligned video content. The grant will support a minimum of 20 content creators to produce 200 hours of science, technology, engineering and math content in Hindi and other vernacular languages. In addition, it will develop a hub to share best practices on how to create engaging videos.

The Teacher App, which creates video content and podcasts for math, languages and pedagogy for Class 1-5 in Hindi for teachers, will be given $1 million to scale its operations. It works with three state governments – Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand – to train teachers. So far, around 95,000 teachers have logged on the platform that offers 50 hours of content.

Speaking at the press conference to announce the latest grants, Nick Cain, Education Lead, Google.org, said technology can play a powerful part in solving the learning gap in India and the company is expanding its investments to ensure that all teachers and students are able to benefit from it. “The new funds will contribute in building more locally relevant solutions and content for students,” Cain added.

Google.org announced a grant of $8.4 million to four Indian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the education space – Learning Equality, Million Sparks Foundation, Pratham Books StoryWeaver and Pratham Education Foundation. With $11.4 million, India is one of the largest beneficiaries of Google.org’s $50 million commitment in the education space. Other countries include Kenya, Indonesia and Nigeria

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