Someone offers you a laptop. Yes, it was built for $150 and is therefore pretty damn cheap as far as laptops. It's better than nothing, absolutely. It's an impressive feat of engineering. But - according to late night commercials anyway - just $1 per day could sponsor a child in a developing nation. That's almost five months of food, medicine, school supplies, etc. Which would you pick?
The One Laptop Per Child program states the following on its website:
Our goal: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.Great, they can express themselves now - but does that make them any less hungry, thirsty, or sick?
Yes, the One Laptop Per Child program does good. It helps them. But is it really the best way to help them? It seems that microfinance, encouraging condom use in Africa to fight AIDS, improving irrigation and farming techniques or many, many other things would be more well suited to their needs.
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6 comments:
Imagine you are a child in a developing country with a low average income per family. Your parents afford to buy you food and medicines, but thats the best they can do. They don't even think about buying you a computer, because they don't know exactly what it is and they don't afford to spend a huge amount of money on it.
This is the case where olpc is best suited.
Look at it this way. Laptop is a tool to enable these kids to feed themselves. That is a lot more powerful then creating a dependancy where they rely on given food.
Your post is in line with Bill Gates' thinking when he started the foundation: why aim to "get a desktop on every desk" (MSFT's old mission-statement) when a mosquito net does a hell of a lot more good?
But then again, there are a heck of a lot of charities out there that aren't efficient. I would even argue that most local charities are inefficient, since even the poorest of the poor in the US have access to basic health services far better than those available in deepest Africa. Taking this logic even more controversially, breast cancer is a pretty small problem in comparison to tuberculosis (a curable disease).
People are allowed to set up charities for whatever they want, just as they are able to spend their own money however they want. In a funny way, they're an extension of the same freedoms that enable capitalism. Some charities think disease in Africa is a priority, others curing breast cancer, and others getting a laptop in the hands of a low-income child in the 3rd world.
I agree that giving starving children in Africa a laptop might not be the best thing to do. But what about children in other nations such as Russia who have enough to eat, but might not be able to afford a laptop? In this case, I think a laptop would be useful.
Keep up the great work. It very impressive. Enjoyed the visit!
I have the same opinion with Dan. You could give people in Africa fish and they eat them today, tomorrow they still need fish from you.
People there ALWAYS getting these things from western world, for centuries. I bet there is a pretty good reason that why they always take but not give. While other Asian people are working very hard to get away from poverty and they made it, Africa is still just as yesterday I don't know if it makes sense to give laptop to them but at least it's a new try. The children there might use laptop to educate themselves to fish but not to get fish from others.
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