28 July 2006

Nigeria orders first million $100 laptops

At TED2006, former MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte outlined the challenges of producing the $100 laptop, which will be designed for -- and only available to -- children in the developing world. The key, he suggested, is scale. The economics will work when countries begin ordering them by the millions. Well, according to the Nigerian newspaper, Vanguard, the first order is in: The Nigerian government has committed to purchasing at least one million. India, on the other hand, has declined. (Via VnuNet and PC Advisor.)

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$100 laptops: Nigeria's in, India's out from PSD Blog - World Bank Group
The Nigerian government says yes to $100 laptops. (Although probably more accurate to say that the check is in the mail.)Nigeria has officially ordered and paid for one million of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) devices, according to the Nigerian Vangu... More...

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Jace – August 5 2006

Vinay,

Have you considered that good technology alone isn't good enough, and that the other factors may go beyond negatives like corruption and vested interests?

OLPC has all the hallmarks of a project designed on faith that technology alone will change the world and make the project's backers famous.

It's galling that OLPC wants someone to commit to one million pieces of a technology that's never been tested in the real world, and worse, goes through significant design revisions every few months because the previous design wouldn't work in the real world. What's to say that the production run won't also turn out to be such a broken design?
Vinay Venkatraman – July 29 2006

"India, on the other hand, has declined" , i had been almost expecting this for quite some time. I have been following OLPC as part of my masters thesis and i always felt that its a great piece of technical innovation but the social model to introduce it into a complex socio-political environment wasn't yet there. Just price alone can not penetrate markets like India where there are many political barriers. A successful idea has to take into the consideration at the design level itself various bottlenecks like corruption, political climate, other commercial vested interests and even abuse of such technology.
June Cohen – July 29 2006

You have sharp eyes, Richard. :-) That article did say one million dollars, but it's actually one million units. It was announced at a press conference in early July, and reported in a different Vanguard article:

http://allafrica.com/stories/200607120369.html

"Nigeria has paid for one million, $100 a piece Laptops computers designed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC) (...)

These were announced by the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Engr. Ernest Ndukwe at a press conference in Abuja."
Richard Rowan – July 28 2006

I believe it was not a million laptops, but a million dollars worth of laptops, or about 10,000 units. "Nduwke responded that the Federal Government has paid a million dollars for the first batch of the products"