Peru is poised to deliver up to 676,500  laptops to its poorest children under the (OLPC) program which is the largest such OLPC purchase in the world to date. 

The Lang Report has been avidly covering and supporting the OLPC project ever since its concept was unveiled in early 2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by Nicholas Negroponte, the cofounder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab. 

According to a survey by the World Economic Forum, Peru ranks 130th out of 131 countries in math and science education, 131st in the quality of its primary schools, so it should be an ideal test for the project being that it is one of the first countries to buy into it. And if it succeeds, , it will become a model for other nations.

Oscar Becerra, general director for educational technologies was asked whether children in Lima’s slums would receive the green-and-white machines now being called “XOs”. "No," he said. "They are not poor enough." At first I thought he was making a hard-hearted joke. But he went on to explain that Lima residents generally have electricity and (in theory) access to city services, even Internet cafés. The laptops are headed to 9,000 tiny schools in remote regions such as ­Huancavelica, in the Andes, an arduous 12-hour bus ride over rocky roads southeast of Lima, and villages such as Tutumberos, in the Amazon region.

The computers come loaded with 115 books–literature such as Mi Vaquita, about a rare porpoise, but also classics, like some of ­Aesop’s fables, novels (at least one by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa), and poetry (including verse by the early-20th-­century Peruvian poet César Vallejo). The laptops’ flash drives also store introductions for teachers, reading-comprehension programs and other educational software, a word processor, art and music programs, and games, including chess, Sudoku, and Tetris. The rugged, low-power hardware includes a camera that can capture video or still images. The computers are Internet ready and can wirelessly relay data to one another.

I asked Becerra what Peru wanted for children like Nilton. "Our hope for him is that he will have hope," he said. "So we are giving them the chance to look for a different future–or the same, but by choice, not by force. These children who didn’t have any expectation about life, other than to become farmers, now can think about being engineers, designing computers, being teachers–as any other child should, worldwide." The challenge, Becerra said, "is how to transmit a technology and a knowledge that people in the poor areas never saw, and never heard of."

We are reaching the poorest schools in Peru for the first time in history." The hope is that more children will make lives for themselves beyond subsistence farming or menial labor and providing One Laptop per Child could be the answer! 

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