One Laptop, Much Controversy

Every time a 13-year-old in rural Peru or Tuvalu touches a keyboard, she bypasses the Industrial Revolution and rockets into the Information Age. She can network, learn calculus, study crop-growing techniques, or e-mail a hospital for advice on illness treatment. She can access a wealth of knowledge beyond the horizon fortune has aligned for her. But how much does it really help? Lately, efforts to bring computers to youth in developing areas have been assaulted as ineffective, or even worse—impulsively imperialistic.
   
Last month, One Laptop per Child—an NGO aiming to provide a $150 laptop to very child in the world—suffered major production setbacks, laid off half of its employees, and came under heavy fire for supposedly misjudging the needs of youth in the developing world from the get-go. Talking heads on all continents profess communities need fresh water and malaria nets before Skype and Wikipedia. After all, there are 2.5 billion people on the planet living on less than $2 per day. They need the bare necessities—and you can’t eat pixels.

OLPC was launched three years ago to provide children with “rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptops with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.” The machines—called “XOs”—run without electricity and rely on hand cranks for power. Since its beginning, OLPC has distributed about 500,000 XOs in 31 countries. Even better, for $399, a consumer can simultaneously purchase an XO and donate one. OLPC also receives major ad time from worldwide corporations like News Corp, CBS, and Time Warner.

Still, they have not sold as well as intended due to hardware problems and government skepticism. Many claim OLPC siphons time and energy from more pressing needs, doesn’t support local infrastructure, and assaults the integrity and dignity of many non-Western cultures.

It’s true that the XOs are not survival essentials. At the unveiling of the laptops at the World Economic Forum in 2006, Marthe Dansokho of Cameroon declared that African women who work in the countryside don’t have time to sit with their children and research crops, assuming they’re even literate.
 
But the XO is not a gimmick cure-all. OLPC is not even a laptop program. It’s an education and communication program: the key to smashing cycles of strife. In the long run, this is the right way to go. And, in the long run, they’re not all dead: The global south is not quite the dark abyss of despair the North Atlantic media hypes it up to be: Most people in developing countries find ways to eat and meet their psychological needs each day, although it’s certainly a struggle. OLPC admits that its task is not to cover the basic basics or ease every ill. It is to equip people to improve their lives on their own terms. 

Perhaps a more apt criticism of OLPC is that the laptops don’t directly support local educational infrastructure. The project is decentralized and shifts agency to kids and away from state educational systems. OLPC supplies equipment, not teacher training or better curriculum. But there’s no reason why OLPC can’t accompany other state-sponsored initiatives. Ablorde Ashigbi ’11, an OLPC representative, claims, “An XO is never supposed to substitute for a teacher. But it does purposefully empower the children. People don’t realize there’s an insatiable intellectual hunger in many of these areas. My parents, who grew up in Africa, tell stories of reading their one book all night until the candle wax melted into nothing. You can take a laptop anywhere.”

Some communities are not comfortable with children browsing foreign advertising, entertainment, and general worldviews whenever they like. There’s a legitimate fear the OLPC pushes flashy consumerism and invasive technology on peoples. Mohammed Diop, a Malinese economist, has attacked the project as an attempt to exploit poor nations by making them pay for millions of impractical machines. To many who are used to a history of false promises and downright lies, allowing a U.S. company to hold a financial stake in the education of their children is anathema.

But there is certainly more than one way to be culturally demeaning in development. One way is to make decisions about “them,” without “them.” Another way is to assume peoples are too close-minded to adopt technology or that they would not enjoy the same opportunities as others. So long as the program’s coordinators and supporters don’t adopt a blind charity mentality but converse to find ways to use the equipment best on the terms of recipients, there should be no reason to stop for fear of cultural debasement. So long as OLPC shies away from the popular “Save the Third World from All Its Self-Imposed Problems” rhetoric, tensions can dissipate enough for the laptops to do what they’re supposed to do.

OLPC should not lose heart. There may be hardware problems, and even over-ambition problems, but the NGO is on the right track. Indeed, groups around the world are emulating its endeavors: The Indian government is busy working on a laptop for a mere 500 rupees.

They should keep smoothing out the kinks: There are 13-year-olds’ horizons to transform.


Raúl A. Carrillo ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.