Imagine you are the benevolent leader of a small fictional country somewhere in the third world. Your resources are limited. While your country isn’t as poor as some other third world countries, many of your citizens can’t read or write, and some live in complete poverty. Much of the population lives in slums, and people are currently migrating in droves from rural areas to the city. Your country and the world around it is changing.
Since you are a nice leader and you care for your people, you want to start increasing your yearly spend on education (as well as healthcare and housing). Last month some Westerners in shiny suits came to visit and tried to talk you into buying OLPCs. Everyone else in your position seems to be buying them.
It seems like a good idea, but on the other hand, you can’t really afford them. Buying them would involve cutting back on other things. It’s a substantial decision. You firmly believe that computers and internet are the future, but are they the right thing for you to buy right now, with what little money you have?
And you suspect that the men in shiny suits don’t really know how things will pan out for the children of your country. You’re worried the OLPC might be a white elephant. It almost feels like a big experiment carried out by the west, but funded by you.
What do you do?
- Blow your cash on a lot of OLPCs. Trust that teacher training and infrastructure will emerge organically, as a result of being ‘connected’.
- Don’t buy any OLPCs yet. Instead spend the money on old-fashioned, unsexy stuff like teacher training, books, school buildings and blackboards. Then, watch what happens in other countries like yours that have adopted the OLPC. Perhaps in the mean time some alternatives will appear on the market.
- or… something else? Your suggestions please!
You’ve left out option 4: buy a load, sell them at a mark-up on ebay, buy more OLPCs, rinse and repeat until you have lots of money and OLPCs!
:-D
I’ve never understood how the internet aspect works. In a village, surely somewhere there must be at least one fixed internet connection for the wireless mesh network to connect to. Otherwise it’s just an WLAN, surely?
Where would these internet connections suddenly appear from? Who would pay for them? If the OLPC is going to be internet enabled, the running costs for a whole country of kids would be huge!
I don’t understand where you’re going. What’s a nice leader? Do the men in shiny suits are nice too? What do you mean by “nice”?
Like every other aid to the 3rd world, the OLPC can be a major waste of money rather than a success. But you can’t prevent a leader to use this project as a way to get more funds and influence
Hi Luc,
this was probably my most obtuse blog post ever, but my point was that with all the enthusiasm and hype surrounding the OLPC, it’s worth questioning whether the 1st generation OLPC is definitely a “good purchase” for all the countries it’s intended for.
“Otherwise it’s just an WLAN, surely?”
Yes, that’s true, but I wouldn’t use the word “just.” I can easily imagine a classroom full of kids with these laptops, connected into one or more WLANs (the OLPC term is “mesh”), doing all sorts of collaboration and interaction and horseplay – it’s truly an exciting educational opportunity, even without access to Google or Wikipedia.
As to the question of whether it’s a “good purchase,” I’d have to say that it’s got all the pluses and minuses of any first-generation hardware/software… and *someone* has to be the first! My congratulations to Peru for taking the plunge.
I think that you raised an interesting issue. Reading the OLPC wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$100_laptop) I found a paragraph that disucess the ‘Effective use of money’. Apparently, at the UN conference in Tunisia, several African officials were suspicious of the motives of the project and claimed that the project was using an overly American mindset that presented solutions not applicable to African problems.
One of the officials stated stating that clean water and schools were more important.