I have really tried to resist saying anything more about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) campaign. But this project is so full of the foibles of Western development that it is fast becoming a symbol of a “cool idea” from our outsider perspective that is actually disastrously dumb. OLPC is an easy target. And I can’t resist.
Little green windup gadgets will not help Africa. In fact spending billions on computers when basic education and health care are left unaddressed is madness. According to the report Blue Gold (PDF) by Maude Barlow the United Nations discovered that:
- The annual expenditure by Americans on cosmetics alone is enough to provide universal public education.
- Americans and Europeans spend more on pet food than would be necessary to provide basic health and nutrition for every person on the planet.
Earlier this week I was in the principal’s office at the high school here in town. (No, I didn’t get caught skipping class) In one corner of her sparsely furnished room there was a case of chalk. In the center of the room, was a desktop computer on its own little table. It was covered by a piece of plastic and that plastic was covered by a thick layer of dust. What is now basically a piece of furniture cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. You could buy a lot of chalk with that money. Or fluorescent lighting for the dark classrooms.
But chalk and light bulbs are not nearly as sexy as the OLPC. I heard that the “expected lifespan” of the xo is five years. That is a lie. They know that is a lie but you probably wouldn’t cough up any money if you knew that the cute little computer you’re buying for those adorable children is going to be a dead piece of plastic in less than a year. Again, much of my information is anecdotal because I actually live in the developing world. Laptops get fried by bad electricity. Printers get gummed up and just stop working. Rats chew on power cords. Rain leaks through the roof and destroys our disks. Go away for the weekend and return to discover that termites have enveloped your bookshelf in a casing of red dirt and they are slowly devouring Windows XP for Dummies.
Throwing money at the developing world, or gadgets, or sacks of grain is not going to result in development. Instead it will result in dependence. I see this all the time here in Mozambique. Decades of “aid” have only succeeded in killing initiative. The African philosophy is ngojo kidogo “wait a little” and see how someone else can solve our problems. And that’s a continued effect of centuries of benevolent colonizers “helping the poor natives.”
Here are a few more ways that the OLPC is misfiring:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give a Nigerian child a laptop and he downloads pornography. At least when his older brother isn’t using it to run Internet fraud scams.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give a child a laptop and Dad will sell it on eBay.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give a child a $100 laptop and someone else will have to pay the other $900.
And on and on it goes. Nobody thought to include a printer, for example.
As much as I really hate the OLPC concept, I have to admit that the result of all that innovation will be positive. Better screens. Longer-life batteries. Cheaper components. I think the net result will be positive even if it is destined to be a failed development project. And that’s groovy with me.
But what is even groovier is how Africans themselves are innovating independently of the meddling West using existing technology. It’s all about the cell phone. What advice did the guy get in The Graduate? “Plastics!” Well, here’s my unsolicited advice on the present and future for development in Africa: Cell phones.
- Farmers are using them to time the market and sell their products at better prices.
- Savvy cell phone owners are using “phone credit” as a sort of Western Union to transfer funds over large distances.
- Text messages (SMS) have completely wiped out the post office.
Spend a little time reading about Africa at Textually.org. The innovations are delightful and inspiring.
The OLPC folks are planning a revolution. But they’re too late. The revolution has already started. And its being led by creative minds in the developing world.
More rants about the OLPC by Lingamish:
- One Laptop Per Child. And then what?
- One Laptop Per Child. But no chalkboard in the schoolhouse.
- One Laptop Per Child. Maybe we should have asked first.
ngojo kidogo – wait a little. A Swahili expression and the name of a thorn bush.
I take it you don’t like OLPC David? Good on yer!
I just like an excuse to rant and OLPC is an easy target. By the way, the geeks in our organization are smitten with the idea.
They seem smitten with getting translation tools on the thing. That can’t be a bad idea can it?
Our organisation has a big problem with creating dependency around the world. Jumping on the OLPC bandwaggon is just another symptom of a deeper problem. I am seriously concerned that we may be hindering what it is we seek to achieve as often as we are helping.
I saw OLPC mentioned in an in-house publication but I don’t know any specifics about how our mysterious organization plans to use it.
Paul, I would say that is a good thing if they were willing to be more open, less provincial, less secretive. But that ain’t gonna happen any time soon.
I love you IT guys, I have some of the same virus in my system, but good ideas are almost always bad ideas when they come from the outside. I keep telling myself that and then I keep running ahead with “cool ideas” without engaging in the culture I’m trying to transform.
Lexique Pro, OneWord, Adapt It, Toolbox are all brilliant because they are open (not all open source alas) and emphasizing localization. TW, PT, LL are all secretive cumbersome specialized and impossible for the 21st century. OLPC and the xo thingies are the same kind of proprietary foolishness. When they break they will be junk. Currently we’re seeing a massive invasion of cell phones and laptops into Mozambique. They break down just as fast as the xo will but they are interchangeable, pop out your sim card and stick it in the next phone and you’re on your way. And this is all done without creating dependence. Folks here sell cows, or go without food in order to have a phone. But it’s their initiative. OLPC is a typical handout and it will breed immense corruption like all the other “aid” of its ilk.
Like Beethoven said, “Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb!”
I think the idea is that you give a mother tongue translator an OLPC complete with software rather than a fully fledged laptop, to save money and so there are more to go around. Given that efficient translation really does need computers, and the programs you call brilliant are only brilliant where there is a computer to run them on, that can hardly be an altogether bad thing.
Aren’t these for children?
They’re intended for children by the developers, but I don’t think that’s how your organisation is thinking of using them.
Yep. Shall we call it One Laptop Per Translator or are they going to use child labor to produce Bible translations? I say that jokingly but child labor is one of the things that will result from the OLPC campaign. And adults using them for things that the original “donors” never hoped or imagined!
[...] can seem good in one context seems positively daft in another. There is an illustration of this in Lingamish’s treatment of the well intentioned, but ultimately unrealistic one laptop per child project. This project is a [...]