Haiti Bound

Posted by venti on May 13, 2011 None comments

From the earliest, even pre-XO, days the One Laptop per Child vision was focused on finding ways to reach the most remote and isolated children in the world. As XOs flew off to Mongolia, Ghana, and Niue, thousands more found their way to children in La Macarena, Port-au-Prince, Dujiangyan and Rafah. Locations still isolated and remote but where the impact is amplified by children’s direct witness to intense trauma, either as the result of biblical-scale natural disasters or chronic intense violence. As the recent UNESCO Global Monitoring Report highlights, nearly 30% of the children without access to school live in conflict zones. The targeting of educational institutions, teachers, and academics has been chronicled and was the focus of another UNESCO Report (“Protecting Education from Attack”). The legal dimensions of this ongoing crisis, as well as the best practices to both shield education and introduce specific peace-building tools, were the basis of a Qatar Foundation initiative; Education Above All.

OLPC’s foray into Education in Emergencies began with our successful, but largely underreported, partnership with UNRWA and comprehensive implementation in Gaza. OLPC also continued its development work in Afghanistan, South Sudan and other conflict and emergency settings. It was clear from most discussions and reports at the time that laptops (technology period) was not part of the pre- or post- crisis planning for education. The OLPC Foundation joined both the Education Cluster Working Group (ECWG) and the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) as part of an express strategy to instigate a broader and expert dialogue on how technology for learning can work in those conditions. Technology in Education in Emergencies not only defines OLPC’s beginnings, it is the proof point for olpc.

Children and adults dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), without adequate resources to address it, are more likely to live in a poor country.  Cyclones and hurricanes are three times more likely to occur in a rich country, yet over 80% of the casualties happen in poor countries. Likewise, refugees rarely migrate to a wealthy country, they either become internally displaced people or move to a similarly poor country. Not surprisingly and despite the higher numbers, less developed countries have fewer mental health resources to address the need and, globally, the capacity and ability to support the complexity of the need just does not exist.  PTSD, trauma and emotional stress further impact cognitive abilities and bottom-out learning potential. For more on all this, start with the excellent chapter, “(Disaster) Public Mental Health” by Joop de Jong, in Trauma and Mental Health: Resilience and Posttraumatic Disorders.

Out the 1cc door thanks to amazing work from Adam Holt, SJ Klein, Jen Amaya and Jade Doolan.

OLPC is now entering the implementation phase of a 250 XO project in Haiti in collaboration with Haiti Street. Haiti Street is an inspired group that counts among its major partners both Dr. Jong, and the International Center for DisasterResilience (ICDR).  (During my visit with them to Port-au-Prince in March we had an excellent meeting with John Engel from Haiti Partners. The collaboration would be significant). Rather than OLPC being seen as another programmatic stream, learning is enabled by and supporting psychosocial and medical care. Computational-based learning is a third integrated capacity. This is an innovative approach, and its prospects and the attention it is receiving are encouraging. I jumped while reading Dr. Jong, Dr. Robert Macy (really, OLPC community, get to know him and his team!) et al, discuss the effects of creative as well as trauma -focused activities on psychosocial well-being.

More to come. Stay involved.

 

To further advan

Locally Grown XOs are Good

Posted by venti on April 8, 2011 None comments

OLPC and Peru announced this week that their program will grow and expand by virtue of reaching nearly 1 million kids, and manufacturing XO 1.75 domestically by the end of the 2011. This is an extraordinary accomplishment and so far Peru is the only country in the position to pull it off. It’s doubtful that the lack of domestic production has prevented even one more laptop from getting out into the world. So why now? And why Peru?

Size
Peru is the largest OLPC project in the world with Uruguay close behind. The difference is that Peru will have reached 15% of its children while Uruguay is done, saturated. With some 5 million more XOs needed in the next several years, the low-end of the production volume in Peru is known and that makes for an easier business case. Its also a great commitment to OLPC, Quanta and the supply chain. More significantly it’s a tremendous commitment to Peruvian youth.

Givens
Beyond just their domestic demand (I’m not implying that I know that Peruvian 1.75s will be exported), Peru has been firmly on the OLPC production schedule since late 2007. Quanta has really become a partner’s partner and a real relationship exists between them and Peru; as Bob Hacker points out this really shortens the ramp to production. moving to lima

Actual production of the XO does not involve a “secret sauce”. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people worldwide have taken a screwdriver to their XO, taken it to pieces and reassembled it to working order. That was kind of the point in the design. No one has suggested that Peru is building a $5 billion fab to manufacture displays or that Marvell or anyone else is moving production of critical component parts to Lima. The actual shift in moving the production, the value-added, is significant to Peru but relatively neutral when it comes to the rest of the equation. Nonetheless the apparent commitment to volumes for the rest of the suppliers is critical. Volume is King.

Economics
The general model here is very common: design in Country A, manufacture in Country B and assembly in Country C. The global flow of electronics just rests on the right combination of tariffs, tax incentives and relationships. OLPC, Quanta and Peru had the relationships. Peru has qualified assembly capacity that Quanta could work with and the Peruvian government has more than a few good reasons to continue its extraordinary commitment to one laptop per child.

It shouldn’t be surprising if all of the math is done upfront; how many units, over what period of time, and for how much. It further reduces the element of risk and allows for proper production forecasts; this was the part of the OLPC manufacturing model that was insisted upon from the beginning.

No other country had been willing to commit to large volumes (millions) while also proposing a domestic production model that did not result in either driving the cost up or re-engineering the XO.

This isn’t OLPC becoming a jobs program, it’s the genius of the right relationships doing the right thing to make sure olpc happens in Peru.

Where have all the merry laptops gone?

Posted by venti on April 5, 2011 None comments

I have been openly speculating that since 2008 $1 billion has been spent on one laptop per child projects worldwide, but I think the figure and its prospects warrants reconsideration.

OLPC reports a worldwide total of 2.1 million machines. That’s $420 million.

Intel similarly (too similarly) documents 2.5 million Classmates at a reported cost of $300-$400 per unit. Conservatively, that’s another $750 million.  A further claim suggests that “Argentina’s Conectar Igualdad program – will distribute 3 million Intel Classmate PCs to secondary school students and teachers by 2010 – [sic]”.  The program’s website actually places the number at 400,000 in 2010 (Intel reported 630,000 in early 2011) and a goal of a further 1.5m by the end of this year.  The numbers in Portugal could be off as well, with Intel reporting 750,000 currently, while the country program site reports 550,000 by the end of 2011.

I doubt it’s unreasonable to suggest that OLPC and Intel represent 50% of the spending, and likely a higher percentage of the total laptops deployed in “one laptop per child”-like programs.  Apple, Dell and others price higher and are more active in the US and Western-Europe focused (more on that prevalence later). Reliably the hardware only olpc (lower-case) economy should be estimated at $2.5 billion over the past three years.

I don’t have the data to graph the growth trend, but conventional wisdom would argue its modestly positive although the average unit hardware cost has confounded expectations and remained relatively constant (or even increased). Some blame the Chinese Yuen.

By and large the program numbers can be viewed positively and we should be a bit more bully about it all, particularly as the age of one tablet per child is upon us, but something is delaying the celebrations. And it’s the global distribution of the laptops. The programs’ global reach looks good but transfer the data to a heat map (below: shades of green, point to one for the olpc-countries as a group) and the results are disappointing, at least from a development perspective.


Interactive Map by iMapBuilder

Looking at a series of dependent data on early olpc adopters (Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, etc) or fast-growers (Portugal, Venezuela), its reasonable to ask whether sufficient resources are being invested in critical areas of development and research. Big numbers and growth in infrastructure-rich, cash-ready countries is a market. But development is about accessibility and that’s the OLPC mission.

Primarily OLPC has been following not leading school attainment.

 

HDI in select olpc countries (label hidden behind Uruguay is Argentina)

 

The answer rests in the resolve to lower price, lower power requirements and evolve pedagogy; not to sideline teachers but provide for when an expert teacher and mentor community is not available. UNESCO’s estimate of 2 million teachers to achieve MDG2 just further highlights olpc’s geographic mismatch and lack of reach as well as the time and resource gap involved in pairing funding models, ready teachers and robust infrastructures with needy students. These are the challenges that should define OLPC.

Envy, thy name is…

Posted by venti on March 19, 2011 2 comments

where did you get that idea from?i guess some people like the design ;)

 

The screen capture on the left is from the new (January 2011) OLPC website.  Sometime later Intel came up with a clever way to display their distribution of projects, or did they? Well I guess (repeated) imitation is the greatest form of flattery!

 

$24bn/100m=$240

Posted by venti on March 11, 2011 None comments

Before leaving OLPC to provide leadership to a more needy organization, Zehra Hirji and I co-wrote a draft paper discussing expanding learning opportunities through technology as an economic investment. By no means a unique thought – although not completely explored if quality, and not just access, is the objective.

While most studies I have read link socio-political stability and economic growth (generally minimal and most likely due to improved health) to years of schooling, some studies point to quality as the real driver (see Hanushek and Woessmann). Qualitative milestones being so much more difficult to check-off, while tracking MDGs 2 and 3 are basically a matter of keeping attendance records. Sadly just meeting the goal of increasing student attendance, even in the company of 200 classmates, while studying irrelevant material from teachers just a year ahead of their students, all while being threatened and harassed for going to school, still counts as an achievement.

In development terms transforming learning is the difference between inflationary adjustments to a subsistence economy or stimulating an innovative competitive economy.  Early last week UNESCO released its 2011 Global Monitoring Report noting that 28% of children not enrolled in school live in poor countries affected by conflict, and nearly 50% of them live in sub-Saharan Africa.  While the number of children left out is debated (70 to >100m), and the budget needed to cover them is negotiated (an extra US $16-24bn per year), their countries must be supported so that educational reform broad-based and capable of creating the social and economic transformation that strengthens and creates socio-political stability.  Driving indicators but creating individual prosperity to some through measured investment for the privileged but comes short of learning for all, is too real an outcome when development funding for education remains inadequate or fails to target programmatic priority.

Mobilizing construction equipment, locating (!) and preparing millions of qualified teachers, and distributing reams of learning materials throughout the world, and in conflict zones, is not going to happen fast enough. Hence learning, if left to business as usual, would not occur. More likely cohorts of millions of kids will be denied quality learning. Meanwhile in the past 4 years a guesstimated $1bn has been allocated to one laptop per child programs and, critically, remains absent along with any other tech-based solution for these children. In fact, I have yet to see a detailed proposal for the use of the missing billions to achieve Education for All. Please share it if you find one.

The question is are we, yes a very collective “we”, willing to bet 1 year of the MDG 2 budget on a laptop’s (or tablet’s) ability to bring access and quality in an unprecedented scale, or will we let yet another year go by and give every overcrowded classroom one more blackboard? Moving forward decisively will requires that we begin to truly begin understand how and what children and technology can achieve.