OLPC seeks ITU's help to promote laptops

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association is changing strategy: It has joined forces with the United Nations' lead agency for information technology to further spread its green low-cost laptops to school kids in developing nations around the world.

The partnership shows OLPC is diverging from its original strategy of working directly with governments in order to push its mission forward. OLPC started out as a non-profit focused on creating a US$100 laptop PC to distribute to kids in developing nations to keep them from falling behind the information technology revolution.

The original idea was for governments to order OLPC's XO laptops by the millions, thereby driving down the cost per unit through volume discounts on parts and assembly.

It hasn't worked out quite as hoped.

The laptop is twice as expensive as originally planned, and it turns out, many countries want to order a limited number of them to run trials first. Other nations find them far too expensive no matter what the price.

The result is that despite early hopes for the distribution of millions of XO laptops to school children everywhere, there are only about 400,000 or 500,000 in use today.

"In the final analysis, even US$200 per laptop, which is hugely inexpensive for the technology you get, is just too much," said Matt Keller, OLPC's director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Enter the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency with the ambitious global goal of connecting everyone to information technology and communications by the year 2015.

OLPC and the ITU plan to combine efforts to spread XO laptops to kids around the world, including promotional efforts, sharing contacts in government, industry, non-governmental organizations and others, and even finding ways to raise funds to drive down the cost of the laptops to zero for the poorest countries in the world.

"Our mission is to spread information and communication technology (ICT) around the world. For the least developed parts of the world, the missing link is now available: affordable laptops," said Sami Al Basheer, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau.

"The most important element of this mission is education," he added.

There are a number of countries around the world suffering from a lack of funds for such devices.

In Afghanistan, for example, a country left with little infrastructure after 35 years of nearly constant warfare, first with the Soviet Union and then civil war, the idea of using technology such as the XO laptop is a stretch.

Consider this: until 2002, Afghans had to travel to Pakistan or other neighboring countries just to make a phone call, according to Amirzai Sangin, Minister of Communications and Information Technology in Afghanistan.

The U.S. and other members of the coalition with troops in Afghanistan have been generous with funds and building projects, said Sangin, "but you have to consider everything else that we have to allocate money for."

"Two hundred dollars per laptop is a lot of money," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.