The Failure of the $100 Laptop?

RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."

Africa?

[onion2k]

Look at the list of countries that have expressed an interest so far:

        * Brazil
        * Thailand
        * Egypt
        * United States (specifically the states of Massachusetts and Maine)
        * Cambodia
        * Dominican Republic
        * Costa Rica
        * Tunisia
        * Argentina
        * Venezuela
        * Nigeria
        * Libya

Firstly, the minority are african, secondly most of them have basic housing and a working power infrastructure. This laptop idea is something that countries come in on when they want to improve education. It is not, and never has been, an alternative to buying food.

Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.

Re:Africa?

[vidarh]

The term "second world" refers to states aligned with the Soviet Union, not with countries with economies between "third world" and "first world" countries.

Foreign People harldy get developing countries

[Wooky_linuxer]

I am brazilian. As such, I've seen that most foreign people simply don't understand the socio-economics of developing countries.

An anedoctal evidence: I have some relatives in Italy, and I visited there once or twice. They live in the most developed and well-fared north, somewhere near Brescia, not too far from Milano. Brescia itself has some 200k habitants, and the city they lived in should have some 20-30k. One night, after showing me around, they asked me (quite seriously) if I was distressed from the "big cities", seeing so many people and cars and so on. I looked back at them nonplused, I suppose. I grew up in Sao Paulo, go look in wikipedia how big is that. But I understand that people from Europe and US mostly believe that all Brazilians live either in huts around the Amazon forest or in very poor "favelas" around Rio de Janeiro, where they can conveniently get dressed up (or down?) for Carnaval. Well, I am not trying to say there is a large percentage of the population in Brazil and other developing countries that is indeed very poor and has not access to technology (a recent survey says around 40% of brazilians never used a computer, and 60% never entered "the Internets"). But most people here have some kind of access to school, however poor and lacking resources they might be, and they are not naive helpless savages as you might guess. People need opportunities to grow. Sending US$100 worth of food to poor people might do some well to those that indeed do not have enough to eat, and I'd urge responsible people to donate (or even better, get engaged in) reliable organizations that do that task. But giving away food won't put the poor people around here, India or Africa in the right way, where they can build a self-sustainable industry and technology to compete with today developed countries. So, either some people are simply ignorant or naive enough to understand this, or perhaps they are beginning to get worried that someday the countries that supply food and raw materials to them today at bargain prices won't be there anymore.

Re:The main problem

[Dunbal]

Like the people here on Slashdot, everybody got opinions, but nobody DOES ANYTHING.

      I dunno. I live here in the third world. I'm a physician. I have passed the US medical licensing exams. I could be in the US, earning over $150,000 a year. Nonetheless here I am in the third world, working twice as hard for about $30k a year. But I feel that I am DOING something. What are YOU doing, exactly?

Re:Sure

[vidarh]

Nigeria is a typical example of skipping a generation - due partly to the cost of laying cable, partly to the incompetence of the public telco that until recently had a monopoly, Nigeria has somewhere between one and two million landlines. But they now have about 20 million cellphones. The landlines were rolled out over decades, while the cellphones almost all came within the last 4-5 years.

Fact is, putting up cellphone towers to cover the urban areas is very cheap and provides high returns, while laying cable cost ridiculous amounts of money. Landlines are cheap in industrialized countries only because the telco's have had a hundred years to build their infrastructure and generate revenue to recoup their investments

$100 to feed a village for a year? I dont think so

[tnewsletters]

I work for an NGO in Yemen, and $100 will not feed 4 houses of 5 persons for 2 months in a rural area, much less a village for a year. I cannot believe that such an outrageously inaccurate statement can be made.

Please put this info in summaries, kthx

[Mateo_LeFou]

Dvorak has demonstrated that he is a blatant shill. His reporting is unbelievably amateurish (anyone notice that he only interviewed *critics of the OLPC program?) but he knows how to get slashdotted. So as long as we keep accidentally clicking on his articles he's going to keep getting paid.

Editors, we need to know when TFA is by Dvorak, so that we can ignore it. Even better: quit approving his articles.

Not all poor live in mud huts!

[Gadren]

Why do people still have this image that all poor people live in mud, and each what little grass they get? Maybe they have little grass skirts and spears? Until the West gets rid of the idea that the majority of the poor in the world have completely nothing, things won't get fixed.

The purpose of the Laptop isn't to be sent to the areas of the world where food and water are the biggest and most desperate needs. They are to be sent to places where most basic needs are taken care of, but the people could use an extra boost to educate themselves and get better jobs and raise themselves out of poverty. The idea that "there are worse problems, so if you don't help with the worst one, then you can't do any good" is one of the most flawed and disgusting ideas. It's the same argument that we shouldn't have gone into space until we feed every person on the planet. Some people have strengths other than giving hygiene kits or delivering rations to starving areas of the world. Why can we not use what we're best at (programming skills) to help out the poor in another way?

May I ask what the writer of this FUD has been doing to help the starving? You shouldn't be wasting your time writing anything, after all -- it's taking time away that you could be donating food to the hypothetical mud-hut-dwelling Africans.

Re:Let them decide for themselves

[hanssprudel]

Uncle Milty Friedman, the free-market radical, has finally bit the turnip, maybe his execrable idea that the world is a zero-sum game

Umm, the idea of Milton Friedman and other economic liberals is that the world is NOT a zero sum game, which is why the fact that we are wealthy is taking exactly nothing away from people in the third world (who were poor when we were poor, and would still be poor if we became poor again).

If you are going to spout bullshit, at least you could try to not be 100% wrong in the first sentence...

their hut?

[Cheeze]

Can the article be any more condescending? Why try to reinforce the 3rd world stereotype. There are cities, with cars, buildings, offices, airports, etc in just about every 3rd world country.

What about those families that are cram packed into an apartment and barely make ends meet?

Even if one of them ends up in a hut like the article suggests, this will probably be a turning point in their culture, much like a renaissance.

Re:Sure

[beeblebrox87]

they don't have proper roads and cable tv and microwaves and cell phones.

In Tanzania, where I live, at least in urban areas a large proportion of the population has cell phones. The $20 for a prepaid phone is large (about half the monthly minimum wage) but manageable expense. There is essentially no landline phone system so these are essentially the only means of communication available to most people, and are common even in areas with only unreliable electricy and little other infrastructure. IMHO mobile phones have greatly increased the standard of living of many, as well as facilitating commerce, medical care, etc.

Give a man a fish - or teach him to fish.

[sbaker]

Sure - you can give a village $100 worth of food - and if they ever actually get the food - and if it's not stolen by the local warloads - or the cash skimmed off by some corrupt politician - or eroded by all of the administrative overheads - then they'll be much better off for a year. They'll probably also stop planting crops too. If you keep it up for enough years - they won't even know how to plant crops. What happens the next year and the year after and for the next 100 years?

You could build them a generator - but who will service it? Where will they get gas to power it? OK - make it a windmill - but still, who will fix it when it breaks?

You can go on propping up these failed third world economies by paying 'welfare' - or you can try to fix the root problems and let them support themselves.

In the long term, what these countries need more than anything else is better education. With education, they can pull themselves out of mire that currently drags them down. That's a long term, sustainable, solution. $100 doesn't buy many text books - but it does buy Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg...it gets them keyboard skills. You can sit in a little hut in the middle of a drought blasted desert and so long as you have Internet access, a clockwork laptop and the right skills, you can earn vastly more money than you could ever earn any other way. You can earn enough buy your own generator - or you can learn enough to realise that in your environment, a windmill would be a better choice (or not) - you can learn how to service it. Even if you are a farmer in Kenya - you can learn what the current price of coffee in various markets - you can negotiate prices directly with StarBucks instead of being paid 1% of the value by some sleazy middle-man.

But they can't do that without education and a way to reach out to the outside world.

So - give a man a fish or teach him to fish?

Re:Disagree with a point

[dalutong]

That's why these laptops come with foot pedals so they can be used without electricity. And they automatically create an ad-hoc wireless network, so you don't have the same need for "human infrastructure" (meaning IT people.) Hopefully they are also setup so they can automatically share internet connections on that ad-hoc network.

Re:Disagree with a point

[csguy314]

you need the electricity and the networking infrestructure to get on the internet - something quite difficult in places these laptops are intended to go.

Not necessarily. Since the laptops are apparently crank powered the electricity can take care of itself. Networking is also possible in some of the more remote places. I've spent a little time in villages and some remote parts of Africa and one thing you'll notice is how much signal you get on your cell phone. In villages that have no electricity and no running water you can still use your cell phone to send text messages to friends back home (cuz making calls is bloody expensive).
It's conceivable that internet access could be provided too.