$100 Laptop for developing countries

[horas]

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It would cost yourself $300, you got one laptop, the other two are donated to the poor children.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pete/sets/72057594143224765/

http://www.laptop.org/faq.en_US.html

http://www.laptop.org/

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[HashiriKata]

Let's give the third world a taste of what they need from us!

Let's teach them/ force them to need what they don't need!

Let's make them feel totally inadequate, and eventually they'll sell their souls and bodies to us for more of our discarded junk!

$100 a laptop, and this is only the beginning!

$100 a laptop for the third world, and this is the only alternative!

(And we don't want to know any other alternatives!!!)

[Lugubert]

Satire is very difficult.

Great job though, HashiriKata!

I would prefer to donate to for example a well drilling project to supply a Bangladeshi village with arsenic free water.

To reverse the thinking, the main lesson I got when studying Hindi in India for a month was that it is possible to live without much of the complicated and expensive modern technology and still be happy, well-fed, etc.

OTOH, there are hi-tech things that do add to the possibilities of rural and/or unprevilegied people. Owning a cellphone will allow even small scale growers to find a better price than when relying on some village monopolist buyer, learning to use cheap computers may give kids better opportunities for more education etc.

[Lu]

Opening an internetcafe is a better idea, I think. A laptop is only used by one person, and not all the time. Put the laptop (or computer) in a bar and hire it out, and many more people can profit from it.

[libertango]

from what i remember, those laptops were meant to replace textbooks... so in that way, they would save poor families alot of money.

[Lu]

Not really. $100 can buy a lot of textbooks, especially in developing countries, were prices are lower.

$100, that's about Y800, you can buy textbooks for an entire (small) Chinese school for that.

[Lugubert]

I'll try to find the video, despite its being mainly in Swedish, but anyway there seems to be in India a project providing Internet access through what looks rather like phone booths (but free!), where kids (as well as adults) can connect to and use the 'net using a full keyboard and looking at a perfectly normal monitor.