Uruguay Is First - Who's Next ?

Finally, a country, Uruguay, has stepped up and used the One Laptop Per Child program to provide every student in a state primary school with a laptop computer. The program had hoped to provide the computers for $100 each, but it's costing a bit more than that.

Uruguay paid $261 per computer, but that price includes the computer, maintenance costs, equipment repairs, training for teachers and internet connection. It still doesn't sound like a bad deal at all. It cost the country less than 5% of its education budget to provide the computers to over 362,000 pupils.

Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez passed out the final computers at a Montevideo just a few days ago (October 13). The government plans to extend the laptop program to secondary schools and pre-schools next year.

Michael Brechner, who is in charge of the government's laptop program, said, "This is not simply the handing out of laptops or an education program. It is a program which seeks to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge." About 70% of the students receiving the laptops had no computer at home.

I applaud the government of Uruguay for taking this bold and visionary step. I hope it'll only be a short time before many other countries follow their lead.

$100 Laptops Ready To Start Production

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization says it is now ready to mass produce their $100 laptops. They have instructed their hardware producers to ramp up production, and hope to have many computers ready for sale in October of 2007.

The computers are meant for poor children in emerging nations. OLPC says the main purpose of the computers is educational, but they will also be able to connect to the internet through WiFi. OLPC is hoping to connect children all over the world through the tiny green and white 1GB computers.

The computer is a pretty stripped down model compared to the computers we in the developed nations are used to. They really wouldn't be able to perform modern office functions, but they should be very functional for the educational and communication needs of these children.

The computers have a rugged plastic water-proof case and have been engineered to be very energy-efficient. They don't even need to have electricity available, since they are designed to run off solar-power, a foot-pump or a string-pull charger. The machines use a stripped-down version of open source software.

The machines have been successfully tested in Nigeria and Brazil. Curently they cost $176, but OPLC believes that with mass production and bulk sales they believe they will get the cost down to $100 (they need to sell 3 million to get this done).

Even though the machines were meant for sale to the governments of emerging nations, there is now talk of selling the machines to the public at large. One idea is to require the consumer to buy two (with the second going to a child in a developing country). So far, orders have come from the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Thailand, Libya and Pakistan.

I think this is a brilliant idea, and I hope that governments and charitable organizations all over the world will purchase millions of them and put them into the hands of poor children. It's just a fact of life today that both computer and educational literacy are a must if we expect these people to join the modern world.

I hope they sell many millions of the little green and white machines.