I too thought that the small plastic computers might meet their doom quite quickly in rough places like Africa. Since I don’t know your experience with Africa, or third-world countries at all, I’ll just explain what I know.

If you have ever visited the bush country of Africa, you’ll find people with their highly prized radios (cell phones now too). If those precious pieces of technology are broken you would be surprised at the extent of ingenutiy Africans have to fix things. In fact, Kenyans in particular are so good at it that a whole economy has grown up around what is called the Jua Kali – fixers and creators of things. Basically, I understand your hesitation, but I differ in opinion on what the outcome will be.

Providing $100 computers for children seems like a good idea, but then as one digs deeper into the project, it stinks. The groups web page says the units will not be for sale, but only distributed through “large government initiatives.” Mistake number one. These are the last people concerned with a project like this. Small plastic units, if they get produced and distributed, will only pollute our environment with more plastic garbage when these units become unusable, as they likely will in the bush of Africa or the deserts of the world, to be discarded where one stands.

This project feels like it was developed by a politician; not for anything positive other than the ego of the politician. This is a wasted effort on a no-good project for a no-good idea. Spend your money elsewhere and leave private enterprise to develop what our world needs, which is other than a $100 computer.

Quite correct and I seem to recall reading somewhere that to get down to the $100 price tag, countries would be required to buy a minimum of 1 million laptops. $100 million is quite a hefty outlay for some of the smaller, poorer countries that need them the most. In Botswana for example there arn’t even 1 million students so they would already presumably not qualify, unless they formed cartels with other small (in population) countries. This of course would introduce some beurocratic issues to overcome while for countries like Australia and Canada, $100 million is probably a small part of their education budget.