One Laptop per Child

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative that operated from 2005 to 2014 with the goal of transforming education for children around the world by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.

When the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so achieving this objective required bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer designed by Yves Béhar with Continuum, now EPAM Continuum. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, and Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support. After disappointing sales, the hardware design part of the organization shut down in 2014.

The OLPC project was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English.

It was criticized for its US-centric focus ignoring bigger problems, high total costs, low focus on maintainability and training and its limited success. The OLPC project is critically reviewed in a 2019 MIT Press book titled The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child.

OLPC, Inc, a descendant of the original organization, continues to operate, but the design and creation of laptops is no longer part of its mission.

The OLPC program has its roots in the pedagogy of Seymour Papert, an approach known as constructionism, which espoused providing computers for children at early ages to enable full digital literacy. Papert and Nicholas Negroponte were at the MIT Media Lab from its inception. Papert compared the old practice of putting computers in a computer lab to books chained to the walls in old libraries. Negroponte likened shared computers to shared pencils. However, this pattern seemed to be inevitable, given the then-high prices of computers (over $1,500 apiece for a typical laptop or small desktop by 2004).

In 2005, Negroponte spoke at the World Economic Forum, in Davos. In this talk he urged industry to solve the problem, to enable a $100 laptop, which would enable constructionist learning, would revolutionize education, and would bring the world's knowledge to all children. He brought a mock-up and was described as prowling the halls and corridors of Davos to whip up support. Despite the reported skepticism of Bill Gates and others, Negroponte left Davos with committed interest from AMD, News Corp, and with strong indications of support from many other firms. From the outset, it was clear that Negroponte thought that the key to reducing the cost of the laptop was to reduce the cost of the display. Thus, when, upon return from Davos, he met Mary Lou Jepsen, the display pioneer who was in early 2005 joining the MIT Media Lab faculty, the discussions turned quickly to display innovation to enable a low-cost laptop. Convinced that the project was now possible, Negroponte led the creation of the first corporation for this: the Hundred Dollar Laptop Corp.

At the 2006 Wikimania, Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop Per Child Project would be including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. Wales explained, "I think it is in my rational self interest to care about what happens to kids in Africa," elaborating in his fundraising appeal: