Green IT Toolkit

The $100 laptop could eliminate poverty

Tags:
One Laptop Per Child,
Nicholas Negroponte,
$100 Laptop

Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman, One Laptop Per Child 0

Published: 05 Dec 2006 13:55 GMT

...never show up at school. And some show up drunk. So really, if you are going to affect education, you cannot just train teachers and build schools. That will take you the next 30 years and it's a long and slow process. So the only alternative is to leverage the children themselves and that's what One Laptop Per Child is. It's how can you give the child an opportunity to have a bigger role in his or her learning.

Let me give you one more statistic: that in the developing world, most schools, certainly rural schools, are two shifts. And by that I mean one group of kids goes in the morning and another group goes in the afternoon. You get double the duty cycle. A shift typically starts at eight in the morning and ends at noon. It starts late, it ends early, there are recesses. So a child is in school two and a half hours a day, five days as week. That's the amount of time a child spends in the best of all possible conditions. So you can't just do something for a school, let alone build a computer lab, which is really ridiculous. What you've got to do is to take advantage of the other hours and again that's why you're doing One Laptop Per Child.

So this is Seymour Papert, 20 years ago. Obviously a pretty rich school. This is more recent, 2002. This particular school, I actually built it myself and we shipped laptops up to this village in 2002. The kids took them home at night and the parents loved it. Because they were the brightest light source in the house. No electricity, no telephone, no water and in fact, in our five villages, two of which don't even have a road, the average income in that village is $47 a year. And would somebody like to guess what the first English word of every kid in that picture is? Yes. Exactly. It's Google. That's their first English word. The first thing the kids did, and again they only read and write Khmer, in fact these kids are so young, most of them don't even read and write Khmer, but they pretty quickly, like in 30 days, are pecking away in English and went to the Brazilian football site and they all now wear Ronaldo T shirts, for better or worse.

But the point being that this had an enormous impact, one of which is that this year, this September, in this exact same school, twice as many kids showed up for first grade. And these weren't from neighbouring villages. And clearly five years ago everybody didn't have twice as many kids. What happened was that the parents had been keeping the kids at home, not sending them to school. And just peer pressure, one kid saying to the other, "Hey, this is pretty neat. You should consider coming to school", and parents sort of thinking, "Well maybe this really, actually is something interesting".

So what we did is, we decided to scale that project. To scale this, if you look at it, the telecommunications in this picture is very elastic. We brought two megabits per second into the village, and that will support 30 kids, 50 kids, 80 kids, 100 kids. Really, you may get slower response time, but it's pretty elastic. If you want One Laptop Per Child, there's no elasticity whatsoever. You get five more kids, you need five more laptops. And one of the problems with laptops is an industry-wide problem. And trust me, I know it from both sides of the fence.

In full disclosure, let me remind you, or tell you if you don't know it, I'm on the Board of Directors of Motorola and have been for a very long time. I think I may even be close to their most senior board member in more ways than one. What do we do in the cell-phone industry? The natural tendency of electronics is to drop in price. Now what you do is, to compensate, you add features. And each year, as it drops in price, you add more features.

That's what's happened in the laptop industry. So the price is constant. The laptops I see in this room are roughly the same price they were 10 years ago. Now it's changed a little bit recently, but still not much. But as you add more and more features, you make a bigger and fatter system. And that system then starts to become unreliable. But more importantly, it starts to become so big that it's like a fat person. A very fat person uses most of their muscle to move their fat. And that's what's happened with laptops. Your laptop is using most of its muscle to move its fat. And so what we said to ourselves is: "Let's change that". And it's not that we build a compromised machine. In fact, I think I will show you, or prove to you by the end of this afternoon, that this laptop is actually better than yours.

You can find the rest of the speech here.