Jon Gosier writing in
Appfrica:
I have had a handful of conversations with the staff from OLPC and presented the idea of locally manufacturing parts or assembling entire machines in-country, and rather than only distributing through governments at the disruptive cost of ‘free’, selling to governments at a premium and selling to small private sector companies at cost. My complaint echoing Teddy’s that there need to be local stake holders who AREN’T just governments. This model has a double bottom line, supporting local business while also offering the same immense social benefit that Nicholas Negroponte originally aimed for.
I sometimes wonder whether the OLPC folks understand the importance of building local productive capacity. And the futility of relying on largely
inept governmental agencies.
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4 comments:
Local manufacture would be wonderful, as long as it does not make the project less practical. What companies do you have in mind to do the manufacture or assembly who are competitive with Quanta in China in both cost and quality?
Portugal's Magellan project might be a better model than OLPC. In addition to government and NGO involvement, Portugal aligned local OEMs (to build the laptops according to government spec) and local telecoms (to provide subsidized wireless data service), along with multinationals like Microsoft and Intel. Because every stakeholder had skin in the game, Portugal was able to deploy 1 million laptops cost-effectively in less than 3 years.
@Edward - Herein lies the problem. I am of the opinion that it's hard if not impossible to bring in any technology from outside and successfully deploy it long term in Africa. I think the folks at kickstart.org are trying to build a supply chain that involves local content.
A 20,000naira OLPC laptop would be a great investment for many many many Nigerians. The potential to open up kids to information and that machine-interaction style of learning won't be lost on middle class parents, by which I mean not the mansion owners but people on as low as 30,000naira a month.
The Nigerian government can afford them but until now hasn't, since the government has sucked soooooo bad.
You can afford ten. I wish you would donate a few. I would like to see more internet use...
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