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The True Cost of One Laptop Per Child

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-idea-falls-short dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The '$100 laptop' Negroponte is hoping to put in the hands of millions of kids in developing nations may actually be more like the '$900 laptop.' From the article, 'Jon Camfield says...once maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account, the actual cost of each laptop rises to more than $970. This, he says, doesn't even take in to account the additional costs associated with theft, loss, or accidental damage. Camfield contends that such an expensive undertaking should at least be field-tested in pilot programs designed to establish the viability of the project before asking countries to invest millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars.'" Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

4 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Something tells me... by aetherworld · · Score: 0, Troll

    Please take your unqualified ranting and put it you know where. kthnx.

  2. Re:Two problems I always thought by dedazo · · Score: 0, Troll
    ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE of people in developing countries are starving. MOST have enough to eat. MOST have somewhere to live.

    According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people die of starvation every day, and more than 800 million people are chronically undernourished. On average, every five seconds a child dies from starvation. ^

    NONE of the countries signed up so far have any significant starvation problem. NONE of them are among the most desperately poor.

    So I guess the countries that won't be signing up any time soon are the ones that include the 800M people quoted above? Sux to be them, huh?

    All you've done is yet again repeat stereotypes of the developing world that has no root in reality.

    And you make the oft-repeated mistake of assuming "starvation" has to look like this to constitute a valid argument. You obviously have no idea what it is to live on 400 calories a day. But hey, at whomever does is not "starving", right?

    --
    Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
  3. Re:Something tells me... by aetherworld · · Score: 0, Troll

    no that's racist.

  4. Re:A lot of people are assholes by Americano · · Score: 0, Troll
    Alright, how do you see producing 1,000 units as failure? Would not that be a sign of some success?

    So if I create the world's prettiest snake oil, and produce & sell 1000 units, I can claim success, even if my product does *nothing* but waste money? Moving units != improving the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children around the world.

    While the grandparent post is a bit over-the-top in its criticism, I have huge reservations about the OLPC project, because it's millions of dollars being spent by developing nations on what is, at best, a gamble. They're gambling that giving kids laptops will somehow produce smarter, more educated, more accomplished children. There's no data that I've seen that supports this assertion, and there's plenty of data out there showing how those millions might be better spent to produce better educational outcomes for these kids.

    So from where I'm sitting, it seems like a bizarre waste of time & money on a program with questionable effectiveness, when there's simple things that the money could be spent on that we *know* have a beneficial effect. (Smaller class sizes, better teacher training, better facilities, health care to keep the kids in school, rather than home sick...)

    I hope it does work, don't get me wrong. But wishing really hard doesn't make a program effective.