HomeOne Laptop per Child in Africa
One Laptop per Child is a nonprofit organization that oversees the development of the incredibly affordable educational laptop.
OLPC is currently running the Give-one-Get-one (G1G1) program and so I decided to take a look at how the program is progressing and its impact in Africa.
What is OLPC?
The mission statement:
To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.
OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte, also founder and Chair Emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab, as an education project. Negroponte had a dream, a big one: that every child on the planet have a laptop, and along with it, the possibility of a better future.
Why give a laptop?
So how do they do it?
OLPC is a non-profit so they rely on start-up money from organizations such as Google, AMD, eBay, Brightstar, Marvell, News Corp, Nortel and Redhat, each donating $2 million.
The device is manufactured by Quanta Computers in Taiwan. There are two main models:
XO-1 in deployment:
XO-2 in development:
They are designed to be rugged and with low power consumption – 2W on the XO-1 and it’s anticipacted 1W on the XO-2. Further, if you’re at home with no electricity and you run low on battery power, you can recharge it with a crank or salad spinner, a minute or two of spinning gains you about 10-20mins of reading time (see the 60minutes video at the bottom of the page).
The laptop runs Redhat on a Linux kernel and now a custom Windows XP package. It also integrated mobile ad-hoc networking based on IEEE802.11s wireless mesh network for internetwork connectivity.
Current deployments around the world:
In His own words
Negroponte spoke at TED on the vision behind OLPC:
Two years later he returned to TED to discuss progress:
OLPC in Rwanda
OLPC had a pilot project in Rwanda and Worldfocus reported on the deployment:
Blogger Brian, an OLPC intern, writes about when the laptops arrived at Nonko.
Another OLPC intern, “DLD”, writes about Ethiopia’s second deployment and how excited the kids were
Criticisms
Expressing doubts over the program’s effectiveness, the “Hyper Edge” blog argues that money could be better spent on food and infrastructure projects.
The “Thoughts on Freedom” blog writes from Australia that the program is flawed, as it does not take into account long-term maintenance costs and more pressing needs in rural communities.
More Video..
The OLPC program was featured on CBS 60 minutes:
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December 19th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
[...] that typically arises during deliberations over implementation, besides which hardware models (see OLPC, Intel Classmate), is which operating system software is the most cost-effective to load on the [...]