OLPC breaks 1,000 machine barrier

Beverley Head
Thursday, 25 February 2010 08:59

Business IT - Technology

The One Laptop Per Child project has so far deployed 1,000 of its XO laptops in Australia and taken the first delivery of the next generation devices which it will unveil in coming weeks.

Last April the organisation had ambitions to roll out almost twice that number in the first six months of the programme, but it has yet to achieve the 1,800 machine target it spoke of at that time. In spite of the slower than anticipated start for the programme, OLPC Australia executive director Rangan Srikhanta, said the organisation still had the ultimate ambition to deploy 400,000 computers with children aged 4-15 living in Australia's outer regional and remote areas.

The OLPC movement was founded by Nicholas Negroponte and a group from MIT's Media Lab. It has developed a low cost, robust laptop called the XO, which it has been selling to Governments around the world since 2007 in order to promote education and attempt to bridge the digital divide

Last week Commonwealth Bank group executive and CIO Michael Harte (who is also a director of OLPC Australia) and Srikhanta visited Yolgnu elders at a community in Bakawa in Arnhem Land, NT. Srikhanta said that all ten children in the community had been provided with XO laptops which could be powered using the community's solar powered electricity supply.

The community does not have its own school, and according to Srikhanta, the children have to travel an hour and a half to reach the nearest school.

To date all the XO machines deployed in Australia have been gifted by OLPC itself, although the organisation is working hard to sign up local sponsors for the programme. To date the Commonwealth Bank has been the project's biggest corporate supporter as part of the bank's Reconciliation Action Plan.

The SBS Foundation and PricewaterhouseCoopers have also provided support to the project.

OLPC Australia seeks public donations for the initiative via its website. It claims donations of $300 are enough to buy a laptop for a child.