Selling low-cost laptops to children in developing countries sounds like a great idea. It seems that US$ 200 for a laptop is not expensive in the developed country. However, it is not the case in developing countries.
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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.
And that's just the cost of the hardware, without considering the added costs of support or producing content for these laptops.
Education ministries in other developing countries face budgetary constraints similar to those in Indonesia, meaning little money is left over to fund large-scale computing projects.
As a result, OLPC has not been able to generate the orders it originally envisioned, delaying production of its laptop and raising the question of whether the anticipated orders will ever materialize. To help get things moving, the group has appealed for help from consumers in the U.S. and Canada with an offer to buy one XO laptop, and have another one donated to a developing country.
