Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program is one of the most ambitious educational
reform initiatives the world has ever seen. The program has developed a radically new
low-cost laptop computer and aggressively promoted its plans to put the computer in the
hands of hundreds of millions of children around the world, including in the most impoverished
nations. Though fewer than two million of the OLPC’s XO computers have been
distributed as of this writing, the initiative has caught the attention of world leaders,
influenced developments in the global computer industry and sparked controversy and
debate about the best way to improve the lot of the world’s poor. With six years having
passed since Nicholas Negroponte first unveiled the idea, this paper appraises the program’s
progress and impact and, in so doing, takes a fresh look at OLPC’s assumptions.
The paper reviews the theoretical underpinnings of OLPC, analyzes the program’s development
and summarizes the current state of OLPC deployments around the world. The
analysis reveals that provision of individual laptops is a utopian vision for the children
in the poorest countries, whose educational and social futures could be more effectively
improved if the same investments were instead made on more proven and sustainable
interventions. Middle- and high-income countries may have a stronger rationale for providing
individual laptops to children, but will still want to eschew OLPC’s technocentric
vision. In summary, OLPC represents the latest in a long line of technologically utopian
development schemes that have unsuccessfully attempted to solve complex social problems
with overly simplistic solutions.