Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte devised a plan to bring the third world up to speed with modern technology by distributing laptops to children in nations such as Brazil, China and India — all for $100 apiece.
With the standard price of laptop computers hovering around $1,000, the One Laptop per Child program — developed in 2005 — aims to change this by manufacturing the affordable laptops.
“The plan is for the $100 laptop to do almost everything,” Negroponte said on the OLPC website. “What it will not do is store a massive amount of data.”
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According to the OLPC website, these laptops cannot be purchased by individuals; only mass quantities will be available to foreign governments.
Negroponte said his goal is to sell five to 10 million inexpensive laptops and ship them to governments in developing nations by the end of 2006. These governments will then distribute the computers to schools, according to the website.
Negroponte introduced the OLPC program at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and quickly gained support from large computer-based companies and organizations like Google, Red Hat, Nortel and the United Nations Development Programme.
Raul Zambrano, internet technology development policy advisor of the United Nations Development Programme, praised the plan, saying it “will bring content to developing countries … and bring technologies to people in poor countries.”
Similarly, in a December 2005 news release, Nortel administrators said the company was eager to become involved because OLPC will “help improve education, health care and trade in developing markets.”
“Wireless broadband technology will be the bridge to connect communities that are today disconnected. These technologies are already being leveraged to address the digital divide that exists between developed and developing markets,” said Martha Bejar, president of Nortel’s Caribbean and Latin America and Emerging Markets Solutions.
Negroponte’s plan has been recently criticized by Bill Gates at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in Washington on March 15 after Negroponte announced his machines would include a variation of the program Linux and hopes to include a format of Windows, according to an April 5 article in InformationWeek.
Other critics are skeptical about the effects the laptop will actually have in developing nations.
“There are a number of aspects I oppose,” said Fonly Institute co-founder Lee Felsenstein, a computer engineer. “It is not going to succeed and will drag down a lot of other important efforts.
“They should build infrastructure first instead of giving children laptops without internet connection or facilities,” Felsenstein said. “They are forging ahead purposefully not doing research.”
Zambrano addressed the issue of infrastructure and said that the issue is “valid to a point [but] people who are going to get these products have no options.”
“Whatever they can get, they are going to take because they can’t just go out and buy things,” he said. “A poor student in Malawi, for example, now has access to a new service for education. Soon, kids can actually be empowered to learn on their own.”