One by one, the children ran into the school yard, lining up in a grassy field next to a low-slung building of classrooms topped by a rusty steel roof. Most of these children in Luquia, a tiny, impoverished town 13,200 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, wore ragged navy-blue uniforms, and many had not bathed in days. Their small adobe homes have dirt floors, no running water, and no bathrooms. They share sleeping space with dozens of squeaking guinea pigs, which scamper underfoot before becoming the family's rare meal of meat. The children, then, were understandably giddy with excitement in May as principal Pedro Santana handed them the most valuable thing they had ever owned: a small green-and-white laptop computer.
These children are among the first in Peru to receive laptops from a trove of 140,000 the government plans to distribute to poor rural students this year in a bold bid to revolutionize the country's dismal educational system. Yet even as the students enjoyed one of the biggest thrills of their lives, the organization behind the computers, One Laptop per Child, was in danger of cracking.
The outfit begun by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte had been thrown into turmoil by the stress of trying to achieve the audacious goal of transforming learning by supplying millions of the world's poor children with laptops. Six weeks earlier, OLPC President Walter Bender, who helped launch the Peruvian deployment, quit abruptly in a dispute with Negroponte, the group's chairman. Software security leader Ivan Krstic left, too. Those departures followed a messy breakup with chip giant Intel (INTC) in January. Cambridge (Mass.)-based OLPC's travails seemed to signal that a group that had promised to rescue the world's poor children from ignorance was itself in need of a lifeline.
The fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the group has promoted have met resistance in the marketplace, government bureaucracies, and classrooms. That Negroponte and his colleagues took on way more tasks than they could handle only complicates the situation further.
Since its launch three years ago, OLPC has fallen woefully short of Negroponte's initial goal of supplying Third World children with 150 million laptops by the end of 2008. Development of the XO laptop and software took longer than expected; the price came in at $188 each rather than the $100 first targeted; countries including Libya and Thailand reneged on initial pledges to buy large quantities; and competition from tech titans like Intel slowed momentum. Although pilot programs began in 2006 on test laptops, the final version wasn't ready until late last year. Now pilots are running in 20 countries, distribution has begun in two, and about 370,000 laptops have been shipped.
The group seems to have backed away from the brink in recent days. On May 15 it announced a tie-up with Microsoft (MSFT) to run the Windows operating system on the XO laptop, gaining credibility with a number of governments. And other backers like Google (GOOG) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are holding firm. During the week of May 18, Negroponte ran a four-day conference in Cambridge that brought together education and tech leaders from 44 countries. About 500,000 orders were placed, bringing the total to 750,000 outstanding orders.
A chastened Negroponte no longer predicts mass adoption in short order, but he remains confident that OLPC can have a major impact.
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