Wattpad & GBC-Education’s Global Education Platform Launch India’s Largest Ever Digital Writing Contest
Wattpad has teamed up with The Global Education Platform, an initiative of the Global Business Coalition for Education, to launch YourStoryIndia, a digital writing contest for India. The contest’s purpose is to engage and empower India’s youth and encourage them to share their unique stories on Wattpad to help drive literacy and provide access to culturally relevant, local stories. The Global Education Platform selected Wattpad as their partner for the pilot phase of the project because both organizations share the same vision that foresees billions of people increasing literacy via mobile phones.
The partnership was born out of the basic premise that the best way to get young people to read is through sharing content that youth find engaging and relevant to their own experiences. Through YourStoryIndia, the partners aim to facilitate the creation of youth-generated, culturally relevant stories and appeal to marginalized young people who will be able to read this content for free on feature phones.
This shared vision extends to other partners including HP, Twitter India, Times of India, and Idea Cellular. In addition, Global Youth Ambassadors from A World At School have supported the launch through technical support and promotion, while STIR Education and Teach for India's teachers are encouraging their students to participate in the contest.
YourStoryIndia will run between October 1st 2015 and March 31st 2016 and is open to people 13 years of age and older. Stories can be written in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese.
Candice Faktor, head of business at Wattpad said, "We are delighted to be working with the Global Business Coalition for Education’s Global Education Platform to encourage youth in India to share their voices and unique stories. India is a rapidly growing market for Wattpad and we can't wait to see this market continue to grow."
For more info on this program, visit the YourStoryIndia profile on Wattpad.