The madness of third world laptops

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 22 May 2007 08:35

Opinion and Analysis

Back in the villages of the lucky 10%, fathers and mothers and other villagers desperately trying to feed and clothe their families are looking at these expensive new toys their kids have just been given and thinking to themselves: "Heck, I can sell one of those things on the black market for two months supply of rice and lentils."

So when more and more kids start turning up to school without their laptops, claiming they were mugged on the way, teachers begin to wonder whether it would have been better just to have kept all the laptops locked up at school. Except they can't, because they belong to the kids.

Within months, used OLPC laptops start appearing in bazaars all over the country and can be bought for the equivalent of US$50. Some of them have been sold to merchants by corrupt government officials. OLPC laptops become a new form of currency.

Meanwhile, in a neighbouring district where kids have not been given OLPC laptops, some enterprising school principal has been having discussions with an international aid organization, such as FAIR, that specializes in supplying recycled computers for practically nothing to third world countries. With the help of the aid organization, at minimal cost the school sets up a 50-seat computer lab to service the school's 500 students. Three times a week, each class gets two hours or more working on perfectly good refurbished computers, using commonly used software and the Internet under the supervision of trained teachers.

Without trying to be deliberately self-deprecating, we first world inhabitants are obscenely wasteful when it comes to computing hardware. We change computers almost as often as our socks. Perfectly good desktop computers are simply thrown out because they can no longer run the very latest software. They often end up in junkyards on the outskirts of cities in Asia

Yet many, if not most Windows PCs can be resurrected as either Linux boxes or even kept running with their existing version of Windows. Some of them may need components replaced but they can often be put into good working order for very little cost. These computers would sit well in the computer labs of third world countries. They may not be as new and powerful as the desktops in the computer labs of first world schools but they are teaching the kids the same principles and helping to narrow the so-called digital divide.

Professor Negroponte's vision of one laptop per child is reminiscent of a former Australian Prime Minister's promise that by a certain date no child in Australia will be living in poverty. That day came and went and today, even in a rich country like Australia, there are still plenty of children living in poverty. The goal, as noble as it was, proved to be simply unattainable. Likewise, any vision that promotes the incredibly optimistic (not to mention wasteful) production of 1 billion or more special purpose computers for countries that simply cannot afford them is simply unattainable.