The true cost of one laptop per child

By Stan Beer
Sunday, 24 February 2008 14:23

Opinion and Analysis

Late last year Uruguay landed its first shipment of 100,000 units of the much lauded, sometimes criticised XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation. Buoyed by that success, Walter Bender, president software and content at OLPC effused over the next countries in line for the little green machine. The question is, however, can the likes of Peru, Mexico, Ethiopia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mongolia and a myriad of other impoverished countries stump up with the cash needed to join the OLPC bandwagon? The sums are not that difficult to do.

It is not that difficult to see how Uruguay came to be first cab off the rank with OLPC. With a population of just 3 million, of which about 370,000 are children between the ages of six and 12 years, the total cost to supply XO laptops at $188 each to all the kids in the target group is around $70 million. That's not cheap but for Uruguay it's affordable because this not exactly an impoverished country filled with illiterate children.

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.