Aid organization accuses MIT, Negroponte of exploiting poor with OLPC

By Stan Beer
Friday, 19 January 2007 05:37

Your IT - Home IT

Scandinavian-based aid organisation FAIR has accused the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, orchestrated by Nicholas Negroponte and MIT, of exploiting poor countries and misleading them into taking a high investment risk for a new type of technology, the success of which is very uncertain.

FAIR, which which works towards the spread of ICT in developing countries, claims that OLPC appears to be trying to create a need which has not existed before and which does not exist at all in the world's richer regions. "Developing countries are thus being misled into measures which shift the focus away from their real needs," Fair has stated.

The OLPC program has been slammed as both costly, high risk and unable to meet the real IT needs of children.

"In OLPC's agreement with Libya, for example, one OLPC with Internet and support costs US$208 per schoolchild. A normal school with 500-1,000 students must thus invest US$100,000 to US$200,000 to join the OLPC programme. This price represents a normal 10 year budget for a school in the world's 50 least developed countries (LDCs). In addition there are the costs of Internet subscription, training, operation, infrastructure and responsible handling of EE waste. A PC-lab of new Pentium 4 computers in each school would cost a tenth of the OLPC-programme and is today the preferred solution in model countries like Norway, Sweden and the USA," states FAIR.

FAIR also points out what it claims are technical deficiencies of the OLPC, which make the entry level laptop incompatible with mainstream computers.

"OLPC cannot today be used as a replacement for a normal PC. All software to be used by OLPC must be tailored to the new technology and with today's deficiencies that's a big job. For example, OLPC does not even offer a simple spreadsheet. Theoretically it might be possible for OLPC to be made satisfactorily compatible with PC (WIN/LIN/MAC), but it would take many years of software development to achieve this. With its limited 512 Mb memory it is equally likely that OLPC could never be able to become a satisfactory work station," OLPC states.