Give One, Get One campaign raises $35m
Published:26-March-2008
By Sarah Carter
A North American campaign by social welfare organization One Laptop per Child to provide laptops in the hands of children in some of the world's poorest developing countries raised around $35m.
OLPC said the success of its "Give One Get One" campaign, which ran from mid-November to the end of December last year, will mean it can distribute over 100,000 XO-based laptops to remote schools operating in countries like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Mongolia and Rwanda.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the organization was grateful for the participation in its giving campaign, which he said "will get laptops into the hands of as many underprivileged children as possible."
The XO laptops, previously called "Children's Machine", being shipped have been specially designed by Negraponte and other developers at the MIT Media Lab as ruggedized, energy-efficient machines that can withstand extreme levels of heat and humidity and can be powered manually by a child. The laptops contain flash memory instead of a hard drive and come pre-loaded with Linux open source operating system software. Mesh networking, a mobile ad-hoc networking scheme, is used to allows multiple machines to connect to the Internet from a single connection.
OLPC aims to price the XO laptops at around $100 each.
Negroponte also said that participants in the program had been actively involved in debugging the machines and submitting software patches. "The community model is scaling nicely," he said.
