The Lang Report has been an early adopter in following and advocating for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program whose goal it is to put a low-cost, rugged computer in the hands of every grade-school student in developing countries. It’s the most ambitious effort to provide computers to poor children worldwide, and a South Florida company is handling logistics.

Marcelo Claure, the Bolivian entrepreneur who over a decade built Brightstar Corp., the world’s largest cell phone distributor, into a behemoth with about $5 billion in annual sales, is heading up sales and distribution for the OLPC program, handling the laptops as a humanitarian, not-for-profit project. His company charges what he calls a "nominal cost" for distribution.

"As successful business people, everyone has a different way of giving back to the community," Claure said. "I believe the only way to fix certain parts of the world is by educating children. There’s no better way than to give them access to the world, and that’s what a laptop connected to the Internet does."

Claure said Brightstar expects to distribute the first million of the XO computers developed by One Laptop this year, its first full year in business. Sales should grow to 3 million to 5 million annually within a few years.

Today’s price tag is $188 plus shipping, but prices may shrink toward the goal of a $100 laptop, as output rises, developers say.

"The first 100,000 were the hardest to sell. Nobody wanted to take the risk," Claure said. "That’s why Uruguay was truly a pioneer and everyone [from other potential buyer nations] is going to Uruguay. They say, ‘Hey, this is happening, "

The small South American nation of 3.5 million residents made the first large-scale order, championed by its President Tabaré Vázquez, who ran on a pro-education platform. More than 100,000 of the laptops have been handed to children there.

Medley-based Brightstar is leveraging its worldwide network for the project, including offices in 50 countries on six continents.

But selling the laptops differs from its core business of distributing cell phones for manufacturers and providing warehouses and logistics for phone companies, said Jeff Mandell, Brightstar’s vice president in charge of One Laptop sales and distribution.

For starters, Brightstar is selling the computers mainly to governments, who supply them to children for use at school and at home. Governments often take longer to decide on purchases than companies, with orders sometimes requiring approval in legislatures.

Many education departments face budget constraints. Few have planned for big outlays for computers for grade schools. Buying a $188 laptop might equal what they spend in three years for books per child, Claure said.

"It is no good to give a machine to a child unless they have access to the Internet. Without access, it’s just a brick," Claure said. The laptop program also requires teacher training and investment in wireless systems for children to use the World Wide Web.

"Brightstar definitely have the scale and experience in logistics," said Jay Gumbiner, director of tech researcher IDC’s Latin America office in Miami. But questions remain about how much governments will commit to purchases, should economies slow and their budgets tighten.

One Laptop faces other challenges to fulfill its dream. First announced by MIT Media Lab guru Nicholas Negroponte at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2005, the project got off to a slow start.

Developing the machine took longer than expected and costs more. Some governments criticized the program’s "bottom-up" approach of "learning by doing," favoring a traditional "top-down" model.

Chipmaker Intel and software giant Microsoft also objected initially to One Laptop’s links with their rivals: AMD chips and Linux "open-source" software that can be downloaded free from the Internet.

Intel later joined and then left One Laptop. It now markets its own low-cost computer for children, Classmate, using Microsoft Windows. Microsoft also partners with One Laptop, offering Windows XP for as little as $3 a machine.

Claure said One Laptop welcomes other efforts to provide affordable laptops to children in developing nations.

"Once you give them a computer with Internet access," Claure said, "nothing can fail."

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