Two Billion Laptops? It May Not Be Enough
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: April 16, 2010
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD is a nonprofit group that thinks big. Since 2007, it has sold inexpensive but rugged laptop computers to the governments of less-developed countries. The goal is to equip each of the two billion children in the developing world with his or her own computer.
Udai Singh Pawar
Students in Tamil Nadu, India, trying a Microsoft program that allows multiple users on a single computer.
It’s been slow going. About 1.6 million of the group’s laptops have been distributed to date, said Matt Keller, vice president for global advocacy at the O.L.P.C. Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass. Today, the largest concentrations are in Uruguay, at around 400,000, and Peru, at 280,000, followed by Rwanda (110,000) and Haiti and Mongolia (15,000 each).
In 2006, the O.L.P.C. Web site pitched its laptop as a technology that “could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children.” Today, the “R” word is gone. Now the site speaks in more muted language of “developing an essential resource — educated, empowered children.”
“The biggest obstacle to our spreading the dream is cost,” Mr. Keller said.
Ninety percent of the machines have been paid for by the recipient countries’ governments, whose resources are extremely limited. I asked Mr. Keller if project leaders had reconsidered the “per child” part of the program. “One Laptop Per Classroom”
