One Laptop per Child in Latin America

Abstract

On a global level One Laptop per Child (OLPC) has so far delivered somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million of its XO laptops running the open source Sugar operating system at a cost of roughly $188 each in approximately 40 different countries. More than half of these laptops can be found in Latin America with a number of countries and regions such as Argentinas La Rioja province, Colombia, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay having seen projects launched in the past few years. Additionally countries in the region have also started other large laptop projects with Argentinas Conectar Igualdad program set to distribute 3 million netbooks in part of its secondary school system by the end of 2012 and Brazils government opening a line of credit for provinces to purchase up to 1.5 million netbooks over the coming years. Given this context it is hard to imagine a better place than Latin America to try and understand how these large-scale ICT for education (ICT4E) projects are progressing. So in mid-2010 I spent more than six weeks travelling through Uruguay, Paraguay and Peru to get a hands-on impression of the impact the respective OLPC projects were having, the problems they faced, and how these were being addressed. The visit did not follow any specific formal process. Rather it was founded on an heuristic approach based on the previous three years of being involved with the global OLPC efforts in a broad variety of ways. The majority of my impressions are based on interviews and discussions with key stakeholders, including Ministry of Education staff, independent researchers, principals, teachers, pupils, and volunteers. I also visited several schools in each country and attended teacher training sessions where possible. The resulting findings are categorised in a framework of six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries which was compiled by Tanja Kohn, a PhD researcher at University of Innsbruck, and me in early 2010:

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