One laptop per child in Rwanda

How technology and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement have become key factors in Rwanda's economic growth.

There are few countries that are more associated with tragedy than Rwanda. During 1994’s genocide, more than 800,000 men, women and children were killed in 100 days. Armed mostly with machetes, the Hutus murdered their compatriots at a rate which outstripped even the Holocaust.

Fifteen years on the country is seeking to use technology, as a key plank to further encourage what has been remarkable economic growth, stewarded by President Kagame.

It’s with that economic improvement in mind that Rwanda is now the largest African customer for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement. Some 120,000 of the white and green XO machines are being purchased for the country’s young students.

The main English-language newspaper, The New Times, publishes a weekly guide for young people learning to use XOs and on Saturday mornings there are drop-in sessions in cafes in the capital, Kigali. In the rural areas, where poverty is still the country’s greatest challenge, the aim is simultaneously to teach computer literacy and improve living standards. It’s a leap that many people working for charities and NGOs characterise as taking Rwanda “from the 18th to the 21st century in one bound”.

OLPC, meanwhile, has also subtly shifted its own emphasis - previously, Nicholas Negroponte’s grand vision sounded like it was, literally, to give every child in the developing world a computer. Under initiatives such as “Get One Give One”, Westerners could buy a device for themselves and in so doing fund the provision of an XO for a child too. Now, as the approach in Rwanda exemplifies, there is an acknowledgment that such ambitions are at once too large, in terms of delivering kit, and too small, in terms of the learning potential that the programme could offer.

David Cavallo is the Head of OLPC’s Laptops and Learning in Kigali, where the company’s training programme is based, and also a Vice President for the whole organisation. He says that OLPC is about encouraging a way of learning, and that laptops are simply a means to an end. In Rwanda itself, indeed, the government is not talking about software developers emerging from schools in their thousands; the aim is for a population that is able to steal jobs from those in other countries where outsourcing is already a formidable part of the economy.

That’s why not all schools are focusing on a laptop for each student, and not all children take theirs home with them either. Practically, however, the tasks that young people in primary schools such as that in Kagugu are focussed on are about making learning more interactive and fun. In a country where teaching itself has been dominated by traditional “chalk and talk” methods, this is in itself something of a revolution.

Now one Kigali primary school, Kicukiro, is reporting that students switching schools so they can get the new laptops. A focus on encouraging students to look at basic programming languages and on exploring digital journalism is replacing using the XOs for what OLPC Programme Coordinator Richard Niyonkuru has called, “just typing”.

Even so, while there may be no shortage of enthusiasm, there are often some very practical problems: aside from expected issues of language barriers (Rwanda recently switched its official language from French to English) power routinely fails, and that’s why OLPC’s own focus is likely, in the future to be on developing increasingly affordable, efficient machines.

While the original XO has, in some senses, spawned elements of the current trends for lightweight “netbook” laptops, it is still sometimes more than very rural settings can cope with. So while Kigali’s students are not going to be writing a new version of Windows by the end of next year, Rwanda, a country that many in the West thought had little hope, may yet succeed in using new technology to offer a gateway to further economic prosperity.