The true cost of one laptop per child

Stan Beer
Sunday, 24 February 2008 14:23

Opinion and Analysis

One can imagine that the government of a country like Peru looking to cut back on expenditures in an economic downturn may be tempted to slash a schools laptops program that costs $125 million a year.

Then of course there is Mexico, a country of 110 million people with about 16 million kids in the OLPC target group. Supplying the children with XO laptops would cost around $3 billion or say $500 million a year. Is this affordable? Mexico is an oil exporter and, like Uruguay, has a distinctly second world rather than third world economy, so maybe a benevolent government of the day would sign up to a universal primary schools laptop program. Once again, however, any such program may be tested during a time of economic downturn.

However, Uruguay, Peru and Mexico are filthy rich compared to countries like Ethiopia, Haiti and Rwanda.

As a general rule, the poorer a country is the higher the birth rate and the younger the population. Thus, Ethiopia, with about three quarters the population of Mexico, has about the same number of children in the six to 12 years age group. Unlike the case with Mexico, however, supplying 16 million Ethopian kids with laptops at a cost of $3 billion is clearly well beyond the resources of the government of a country with a per capita GDP of $900 and an annual budget expenditure of less than $3 billion.

With real third world countries therefore, laptops for primary school kids is a luxury that governments will never be able to afford without the help of some sort of foreign aid. The problem is that international aid organisations and foreign governments may not deem laptops for school children to be the most pressing necessity for countries where children die each day from malnutrition, disease and as victims of senseless wars.

From many accounts, the XO is a laptop that should have wide appeal among young children in their early years of school. For the time being, however, OLPC may have to content itself with supplying its laptops to some kids in some countries and leave the war torn and poverty stricken nations to get on with the business of feeding their malnourished children.