Africa deal boosts One Laptop Per Child

U.S.-based One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has reached an agreement to supply some 30 million computers to the East African Community (EAC).

OLPC is having difficulty getting governments around the world to commit to bulk purchase orders of the laptop, which it is selling for US$199. OLPC hopes this partnership will deliver the computers to every primary school child in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi by 2015.

However, while OLPC and the EAC Secretariat have signed this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreeing to work together on this ambitious project, the money to fund the project is not yet available.

"This is a very ambitious project for which we will have to partner with various people and institutions to mobilize and find the resources required to meet our objectives by 2015," said EAC Secretary General Juma Mwapachu, speaking on the sidelines of the 3rd East African Investment Conference the Uganda capital Kampala last week.

Mathew Keller, the vice president of OLPC in charge of Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the two organizations will work together to leverage the advantages of the laptops in transforming primary school education and to promote strategies for better connectivity for the region's underprivileged children.

"It is a good idea but you know problems in Africa. It is practical for our children to start with a computer in class early but you know there will be problems," said John Nkoma, the director general of the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA).

OLPC is a nonprofit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that are inexpensive enough to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of technology.

Of the five EAC member states, Rwanda has already run small trials with the machines.

Rwanda has more than 20,000 pupils using them and made an order for 70,000 more machines. It has shown the other countries in the area the benefit of technology in schools.

OLPC has had difficulty selling its computers and its alternative vision of education around the world. It originally aimed to sell the low-cost rugged laptops in lots of 1 million to governments in developing countries for $100 each but things have not gone according to plan and OLPC has since revised the price upward to $200 per machine.

Keller said that there were currently around 1.6 million machines distributed around the world, with commitments for another 400,000.

"I am yet to look at the contract, I want to look at it, internalize it and then I will be able to comment appropriately, but my hope is that it is a success," Patrick Mwesigwa, the acting executive director Uganda Communications Commission said.