Whats the best way to move entire towns from poverty to the middle class? Buy each and every child in the community a $100 laptop computer, said MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte at a recent conference launching the IDBs new Building Opportunity for the Majority initiative. Negroponte is also founder and chair of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization that is working on developing these $100 laptops for low-income children around the world.
Im not talking about the obese, feature-loaded machines that you see all over the place around here, Negroponte clarified, These are small, hand or foot-powered machines that have a cranks on them, so they can be used by people living in villages with no electricity.
Indeed, the laptops are substantially different from the ones on the market today. In addition to their conspicuous cranks, the laptops are Linux-based machines with a dual display, one thats full color and the second thats black and white, but readable in sunlight. Rather than a hard disk, the laptops have three USB ports, as well as a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory. Also very important, they have wireless broadband that lets them work as a mesh network, so kids with a laptop can talk to their nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network.
Source: IADB.
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