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Our Blogs The BeerFiles The true cost of one laptop per child
Our Blogs The BeerFiles The true cost of one laptop per child | The true cost of one laptop per child |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Sunday, 24 February 2008 | |
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A quick look at the worldfacts.us website reveals that Uruguay has a 98% literacy rate and a per capita GDP of $9600 (about one third that of Australia, Canada and the major Western European countries). It is certainly not a rich country but Uruguay, a net exporter of food products with a low birthrate and a high average life expectancy, is hardly third world. With an annual budget expenditure approaching $5 billion, the government of Uruguay can arguably afford to supply its entire population of young children with XO laptops - even if it is a bit of a stretch. Looking beyond Uruguay, however, fulfilling the OLPC vision becomes somewhat more problematic with the next batch of countries mentioned by Mr Bender. Peru, which has reportedly ordered 270,000 XO laptops, has a population of 29 million, of which about 4 million are children between the ages of six and 12. Therefore, supplying the entire population of kids in the target group will cost more than $750 million. For a country with a per capita GDP of $5900 and annual government budget expenditures of $22 billion, the cost of giving XO laptops to all primary school age children looks somewhat extravagant. Of course, no one is suggesting that governments would be expected to buy laptops for all children in one hit. However, even if laptops were only supplied to six year olds when they entered school under the assumption they would last six years until they turned 12 (a big assumption), that's still $125 million a year the government of Peru would have to find. |
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