By Katie J.

(peacecorps.org) August 27, 2026: I remember being at the Uva Province Regional English Competition, surrounded by teachers from nearby rural schools who seemed skittish around me. They probably noticed that I was the only American there, wearing a sari, and some of the students seemed to know me. Eventually, they realized I was an English teacher, just like them, and began asking how I came to live in a rural corner of Sri Lanka. They went on to ask why their school didn’t have a Peace Corps Volunteer. It was hard to give a good answer.

We both knew their students were just as deserving of support from a Peace Corps Volunteer as my school was. I felt frustrated with the scale of my impact—I was helping lots of people, but only within my little village.

This wasn’t a new thought; I’d been needled by, “How can I help more people?” many times before. But during the English competition, the answer hit me: maybe I could find a way to share the knowledge Peace Corps Volunteers and Sri Lankan teachers were generating every day to create more effective classrooms.

In Sri Lanka, there’s a huge gap between children growing up in cities and those in villages in how well they can speak and understand English. That might not seem like a big problem until you consider that all Sri Lankan university courses are conducted in English. Without knowing English, rural students are effectively locked out of higher education and everything that comes with it. That’s why the Peace Corps was invited to Sri Lanka to strengthen rural teachers’ English and their ability to teach English effectively.

Volunteers are trained to create lesson plans built around speaking activities, which are largely missing from the current Sri Lankan curriculum. What drove me crazy was that there was no way to share those lesson plans, activities, or best practices. With every plan I made, I felt like I was reinventing the wheel—as were the other 33 Volunteers in my cohort and their fellow teachers.

There had to be a better way.

In the weeks before the competition, I’d been reading about social entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence (AI), the future of work, and coding. My mind was primed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs to notice the things that frustrate you and look for opportunities to solve them.

Two things bothered me most.

The first was lesson planning itself. Peace Corps training taught us that a good lesson needs a plan, so when I arrived at my village school, I came in hot, asking my counterpart teachers to write eight detailed lesson plans a day. That didn’t work. My counterparts are also moms who start their day around 4 a.m., cooking and completing housework before and after school. Between teaching in a loud, under-resourced classroom and running a household, they simply didn’t have room for my ambitious demands.

The second was scale. Over 30 Volunteers and their co-teachers were doing the hard work of building lesson plans and speaking activities—separately. Why should there be two lesson plans about “animal vocabulary,” let alone 50? It felt like a tremendous waste of time and talent. My fellow teachers and Volunteers could be doing so much more.

While at that English competition, I realized both problems had the same solution: a platform where Volunteers and Sri Lankan teachers could share lesson plans and best practices and build on each other’s work—a tool for sharing and collaborating in every teacher’s pocket. I raced to a corner of the school, opened my laptop, and started outlining the application that would ultimately become LankaLearn.

I taught myself to “vibe code”—using AI to translate my ideas into working code—and after several false starts, stripped the concept down to a “minimum viable product” or the simplest version that could still get the vision across. When I shared it with fellow Volunteers and Peace Corps staff, the response was better than I expected; they had been frustrated by the same problems and saw this as a potential solution. That enthusiasm turned into a team of 26 Volunteers helping to build LankaLearn into a full-fledged product.

From there, we leaned on a simple “build-measure-learn” approach: get the app in front of teachers early, use their feedback to improve it, and repeat quickly rather than over-designing in isolation. It’s worked—we now have 174 teachers using LankaLearn and giving feedback as I write this.

The LankaLearn team recently met with staff at the Sri Lankan Ministry of Education, who were receptive and excited about the app. They agreed to partner with us on a pilot, with the eventual goal of scaling the platform to schools across the country.

I still think back to that regional English competition where teachers asked why their schools didn’t have Peace Corps Volunteers. At the time, I didn’t have a good answer.

While it’s not feasible for every school in Sri Lanka to have a Peace Corps Volunteer, impact doesn’t always come from one person in one classroom. It can come from building tools and systems that let thousands of teachers share what they know, learn from each other, and build stronger classrooms together.

Katie began serving as an Education Volunteer in Sri Lanka in December 2024.