Who'll Buy Those Cheap Laptops?
Providing low-cost laptops for children in developing countries is a great idea. But while US$200 for a laptop sounds like a bargain in the U.S. or Western Europe, that's not the case in countries where these computers are intended for use. And this raises important questions: who will actually pay for these laptops, and how?
Take Indonesia, for example, one of the world's largest developing countries with a population of 235 million. Indonesia has around 40 million students and buying all of them a laptop priced at $200-- the approximate price of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project's XO laptop-- would cost $8 billion [M], a sum that is 3.3 times larger than the money set aside for Indonesia's mandatory 12-year education program in the government's 2007 budget.
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