Let them eat Cake

Posted Jul 5, 2006 4:14 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

'The poor you will always have with you'. Crisis relief is one thing;
development is another.

When kids who could be in school are on the streets begging at the
windows of taxis because it earns money for sweets, how do you persuade
them to invest in their own futures? Hint: it's not a bread queue.

OLPC laptops will not compete with bread, drinking water and healthcare
for funds, but with textbooks in established school systems. Nor are
they intended for people who are presently starving. This is not
charity, this is investment. The way to reduce poverty in general is to
invest in the poor and in their neighbourhoods. Education is investment.
The OLPC project is an *enabling* one, not a handout.

Child labour is a fractious issue indeed. Many poor families are
dependent on the income of their working children, some of which (such as
carpet-weaving on domestic looms or agricultural work alongside their
parents) is traditional and reinforces family life. Not all child labour
is in garbage tips and airless sweatshops. The way to lift these
families from poverty and the children from the need to work is not to
deprive kids of their incomes but to police their working relationships
and conditions so that they are neither chained to nor crippled by their
paid work, and most importantly to show them that there are better
futures.

Posted Jul 5, 2006 7:14 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Obviously that's the first question that people raise... All the ideas you mentioned are important. But just because somebody contributes to OLPC doesn't mean they couldn't contribute to those as well.

The interesting thing about OLPC is that it's both a compassionate thing to do and also a fun project. OLPC is a very ambitious project and it's experimental and new. This means it's more likely to fail, but I still think it's worth the risk.

As far as power goes, my experience is that there are a lot of places with food and water but no electricity. Even in towns the electicity is flakey and tends to destroy computers. In a school setting, the desks do not have power connected.

Posted Jul 5, 2006 17:12 UTC (Wed) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Well the third world is a big and diverse place. Certainly there are places where the necesities must take absolute priority. And some places, most people have what they need, just not a lot for "extras." I suspect it's that group that the project targets.

I currently live in Ecuador, which could easily be a first world country if it weren't for government mismanagement. There are amazing natural resources here. There are some real needs among some parts of the population, and the organization I work with does, among many other things, help rural communities with potable drinking water. (Amusingly, I was at a dedication of such a project once, where the community threw a big feast for lunch, with what to drink? .... Pepsi!) There are sad cases here where parents force their small children to sell in the street, and beat them if they don't sell enough. And families that have to live near the garbage dump (they were recently required to move their homes out of it).

How this project could help the least fortunate is hard to see. But most in Ecuador have the basics, and if done correctly, I could see it helping.

Another big question might be -- are computers really beneficial to schoolkids, at least before high school? Will it make it easy or tempting to not learn such things as long division, or even decent handwriting?

Posted Jul 6, 2006 21:27 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I think that most of the people on the OLPC team have a pretty good idea about the so called third world.

The first idea is that these places are NOT all like some commercials with everyone living in garbage shipped from the USA, or that they are being ravaged by dysentary or the hulligans next door. Yes there are parts of the world where war, clean water, disease, etc are the primary concerns for people to survive. The OLPC would not be a good candidate for them. It is a good candidate for relatively stable places where people are trying to make the lives of their children better but couldn't afford the USD 200 pricetag for the lowest end computers.

Posted Jul 17, 2006 16:20 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

This seems to be a common picture of the developing world: starving kids with flies around them. Yes, these starving kids with flies around them do exist, and no, they don't make up the majority of children in the developing world. And the main problems they have are caused by wars. So this is not the place where these OLPC laptops will go to.

The majority of the developing world has sort-of-clean water (you need to cook it before you drink it), just enough to eat (usually more healthy than McDonalds - too much to eat is worse than just enough to eat ;-), and so on. What's lacking there is education. And that's where the OLPC program tries to improve the situation.