One Laptop per Child

From laptop.org

mission

Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.

The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation—just like their parents—never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonweal, because it lacks the tools to do so.

It is time to rethink this equation.

Given the resources that developing countries can reasonably allocate to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per pupil, compared to the approximately $7500 per pupil spent annually in the U.S.—even a doubled or redoubled national commitment to traditional education, augmented by external and private funding, would not get the job done. Moreover, experience strongly suggests that an incremental increase of “more of the same”—building schools, hiring teachers, buying books and equipment—is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world.

Standing still is a reliable recipe for going backward.

Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for “learning learning.”

XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.

Extensively field-tested and validated among some of the poorest and most remote populations on earth, constructionism emphasizes what Papert calls “learning learning” as the fundamental educational experience. A computer uniquely fosters learning learning by allowing children to “think about thinking”, in ways that are otherwise impossible. Using the XO as both their window on the world, as well as a highly programmable tool for exploring it, children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential.

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

Until then, stay tuned.

Said Khoury Information Technology Center of Excellence

There are many NGO's that are dedicated to the actual enrichment of a society, rather than purely aid-based. As the saying goes, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

One such NGO is the American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera). This organization has instituted a project to build several Information Technology "Center's Of Excellence" throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Palestinians, like many people throughout the developing world, have a strong curiosity for technology, and a desire to adopt new and exciting technologies. Internet usage is growing, and currently is estimated at 8-10%, despite restrictions to access of high speed internet lines. It is definitely a way to connect to the outside world, a world that often is off limits to the average Palestinian.

From Anera's website:

There is a strong and growing global demand for software engineers and other IT professionals. Having recognized the potential for young people to gain employment in the sector, ANERA pioneered projects in the West Bank and Gaza to provide advanced training and higher education in IT.

In the West Bank and Gaza, employment opportunities are diminishing due to restrictions on movement, closures, and increasing delays at checkpoints. By working over the Internet, IT graduates can transcend these restrictions and earn needed income. Of the more than 1,000 men and women graduated and/or certified through ANERA's IT initiative, the majority have found jobs or have moved on to further educational opportunities.

ANERA's work in IT has culminated in the establishment of “Centers of Excellence”, which offer unique training in software, systems development, and networks with international certification programs, as well as job placement and IT business incubation services. The curriculum trains students in software programming as well as web development, networking solutions, and other IT business services. Business incubation services connect students finishing their degrees or certificates with business opportunities.

On March 8, 2002 at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, the Said Khoury IT Center of Excellence opened; the first of ANERA’s IT centers. Next came the IT centers at the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron and the American Arab University in Jenin, both inaugurated in November 2005. And finally, in 2008, ANERA inaugurated the Najjad Zeenni IT Center at Birzeit University (read the press release).

Another center stands partially completed. On November 9, 2005, ANERA and the Intel Corporation announced their agreement to build the "Intel IT Center of Excellence" at the Islamic University of Gaza in the Gaza Strip. The facility awaits opening of the Gaza borders for supplies to complete the building.

These university bases mean the IT Centers of Excellence can draw upon a wealth of intellectual assets to strengthen their capacity to serve the needs of the community and contribute to innovative business solutions.

An article posted on Anera's website shows what these projects can do for a developing society:



Wa'el, who has completed the IT training program at PPU, now teaches what he learned to new IT students.

There is a serious lack of employment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but three students of Palestinian universities have high hopes for their futures. They recently completed ANERA's information technology (IT) training programs at Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron and the Arab American University of Jenin. In November each of these universities opened a state-of-the-art center dedicated to IT training. These centers were made possible through the support of ANERA and its board members.

Ibrahim and Maher, soon graduating from the Arab-American University of Jenin, want to use their talents constructively. Interestingly, they both want to stay home after they graduate in order to help develop their communities.

"I have worked on a project, the first of its kind in Palestine, that enables mobile phones to monitor shares on the Palestinian Securities Exchange," said Ibrahim. "My partners and I hope we can have this service bought by a Palestinian mobile phone service."

Maher already is trying to give back to his community. "I helped create a program for municipalities that helps computerize city functions. The idea is to make the city's services easier and more efficient. I am now waiting for a response from the city of Qalqilya. This is a program that could be used in all Palestinian cities." He added, "I hear [about] people wanting to go and live abroad. But I really feel I should stay and help my country."

Wa'el, a bright and humble young man who graduated from the IT training program at Palestine Polytechnic Institute in Hebron (PPU) in 2004 now works for the university, both as an instructor and as an application developer at the university's Friends of Fawzi Kawash IT Center of Excellence.

"I realized that I received good training when I stood in front of a class and had to start teaching…I realized that I could in fact teach them," he said

Wa'el is optimistic about the future prospects of those students in this field, "of course, our training gives the basics, all of the foundations, and it is up to the students to make good use of this training in their future careers … All of the friends who graduated with me have found jobs or have gone on to graduate study either here or abroad."

According to the director of PPU training program, Dr. Radwan Tahboub, "the new IT training program has affected the culture of the university. The university has seen how effective and important the training programs are and have integrated similar courses and programs into their computer science curriculum. This is a program that is an influence for positive change in the university as a whole."

About the Said Khoury Information Technology Center of Excellence, from the SKITCE website:

The Said Khoury Information Technology Center of Excellence operates at local and national levels to provide high quality and effective training for students as well as practitioners in the field of information technology. It also facilitates training provided by other organizations. SKITCE has an excellent software unit that develops tailor-made software for local and regional institutions. SKITCE provides the organizational and technical infrastructures for university professors to work on IT related projects. The IT Business Incubation Service at the Center will enable people with good ideas in IT to find a place to work and develop their ideas.



Business Incubator:
The idea behind the business incubator is to provide IT talents with the necessary resources, technical and business, and empower them to create, innovate, and convert their IT-related ideas to high quality products that are interesting, marketable, and innovative. The incubator will provide selected talents with office space, software, and hardware that accommodate their needs. In addition to that, talents will receive extensive and professional training in their area of interest to help them create world-class products. Business skills development track is designed to build and enhance needed business skills in order for the talents to be able to finance their projects. The incubator will play a vital role in linking those talents with businesses that are interested in, and willing to adopt, support, and finance them. In order to successfully implement its vision, the business incubator is in the process of establishing relationships with the business sector, the community, and other essential SKITCE services provided by other units.

Prometric Testing Center

SKITCE is an Accredited Prometric Testing Center (APTC) with the capability of testing up to six students at the same time.

This helps students to get their training and industry certification from one place without the need to travel to any other testing center.

Cisco Systems

Al-Quds University is a Regional Academy for the some of the courses at the Cisco Networking Academy Program. The Cisco Networking Academy Program (CNAP) utilizes a blended learning model, integrating face-to-face teaching with a challenging web-based curriculum, hands-on lab exercises, and Internet-based assessment.

Academy graduates are prepared for networking and IT-related careers in the public and private sectors, as well as for higher education in engineering, computer science and related fields.

Grassroots.org

The internet has changed the way charities/nonprofits raise funds and spread awareness.

Grassroots.org is a website that provides free hosting for American and Canadian charitable organizations.

From their home page :

The mission of Grassroots.org is to serve as a catalyst for positive social change by leveraging modern technologies and business best practices.

Our ultimate goal is to adopt 10,000 nonprofit members, and to provide them each with an average of $10,000 of services per year at no charge (for a total savings of $100 million per year!).

The following article may be several years old, but the software remains a popular one for nonprofit organizations.

Raiser's Edge

Are your attempts at selling to retail stores going nowhere? Maybe your product needs a good fund-raiser.

By Don Debelak | Entrepreneur Magazine - August 2002

URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2002/august/53740.html

If you're hoping to introduce a low-cost product to the marketplace, you're in for quite a challenge. You may have already discovered that regular sales channels are especially hard to break into-products that sell at very low prices just don't generate enough profit to cover all the costs retailers face when adding a single-line product to the mix. Although the experience frustrates many inventors, there is another option you may not have considered: selling through fund-raising.

It's a channel that worked out quite well for Ken Joyner. Back in the early days of his business, Joyner was convinced he had a fabulous idea-he just needed a way to make it succeed.

After noticing customers struggling to carry awkward plastic grocery bags, he decided to develop an inexpensive device that made it easy for people to carry several bags in each hand. What he invented was the Bag Grabber, a plastic holder that can hold up to five bags at once. But while Joyner was ready for the market, the market wasn't ready for him. Says Joyner, 38, "I had very limited success and was only able to get the product into a few 99-cent stores in California."

A Resourceful Solution

Joyner wasn't sure what to do next when someone who saw his product contacted him to see if she could sell it as a fund-raiser for the PTA. "The contact told me about a regional PTA show in San Diego, where fund-raising product suppliers set up tables with product displays," he remembers. "I was able to pick up a few groups [that] agreed to sell the Bag Grabber. More importantly, I learned about the Web sites [that] fund-raising groups [use]."

Joyner found success with two sites in particular: www.fundraisingbazaar.com and www.fundraising-ideas.com. "These sites are really directories where all types of groups come to look for products to sell," he explains. "We [received] orders from all over the country." Typically, groups looking for products to use in fund-raising include sports teams, churches, PTAs and scouting organizations.

Joyner found the fund-raising route a successful one for his business. This year, his Long Beach, California, company, FundraisingWithInventions.com, expects to sell more than 100,000 Bag Grabbers at $1 apiece as well as more than 50,000 Bag Holders, stand-up frames that convert plastic grocery bags into garbage bags. And Joyner expects business to get even better in the future. "[Up until now,] I've been limited by only having a single-cavity mold, [which only produces one product at a time]," he says. "With my success, I've been able to switch to a six-cavity mold, so I'll have six times as many products to sell."

Fund-raising groups take two different approaches. The first is to buy upfront, where the group purchases a quantity of products and then goes out and sells them. The second is what Joyner calls "order takers"-groups that take orders first, place orders for products and then deliver them. "You need to be prepared to sell both ways, as groups typically only buy one way or the other," Joyner says. "For the order takers, you need to have an easy-to-use sales flier with an order form on the back." That order form should have room for 15 to 20 orders.

When pricing your product, there are two main considerations. Typically, fund-raisers will want to triple your price. But at the same time, while people are willing to pay a fund-raising group more than the product is worth, there is a limit to how much more. Usually, 50 percent more is about the limit. That means you have to balance your price to the groups so that tripling the price doesn't make your retail price too high.

The product's price point also affects which groups you will attract. According to Joyner, "PTAs, sporting [groups] and scout groups prefer a cheaper product, typically less than five dollars, so most people will buy them. Charitable groups that don't have the benefit of a youth sales force prefer more expensive items to justify the effort to sell each item."

What kinds of benefits can one expect from selling through fund-raising groups? "The biggest advantage is that you have lots of people selling only your product," Joyner explains. That is a big advantage over having your product sit on a store shelf and hoping someone will see it. But this sales channel offers other significant benefits as well. Joyner works from his home, because he generates almost all his sales over the Internet. Plus, according to Joyner, "You don't need as sophisticated packaging as you do in a store, and you don't need to worry about bar codes or in-store displays."

One last important benefit worth mentioning is that Joyner offers his product for $1 apiece, so he doesn't have to worry about working with a tough purchasing agent over difficult terms, discounts, advertising allowances or other demands. People either like your product or they don't-and if they like it, they buy. And even better, fund-raising sales are not seasonal, as Joyner initially thought. "Groups that do fund-raising pretty much do it all year long," Joyner says. "There really isn't a slow season."

Making It Work

Will your product appeal to fund-raising groups? Consider the following criteria:

• It's needed frequently by most people. In other words, virtually everyone has to be a potential buyer.

• It's easily understood. Kids selling products may not be able to explain your product well, so its benefits and uses must be obvious.

• It's extremely inexpensive. Because the people organizing the fund-raiser will raise your price threefold or more, you need a low manufacturing cost to make a profit.

• It's lightweight. Fund-raisers look for products that will provide as few hassles as possible for the fund-raising committee.

Fund-raising has worked so well for Joyner that he's even turned his business into one that sells other products-maybe even yours-to fund-raising groups. "Groups need different items to sell all the time, and I want to offer the groups more options," he says. If you have a product you'd like him to consider, log on to his Web site at www.fundraisingwithinventions.com. The site also offers practical information for inventors who want to pursue the market on their own, including a how-to booklet Joyner sells for $13.99.

If you're being stymied by traditional channels, check out the possibility of selling through fund-raising. An army of kids may be the best sales force you could have.

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Don Debelak is a new-business marketing consultant and author of Think Big: Make Millions From Your Ideas. Send him your questions at dondebelak34@msn.com.

AED's Satellife Projects - Botswana

"AED-SATELLIFE has implemented projects using handheld computers and other mobile computing devices for health data collection, clinical and public health information dissemination, disease surveillance, and continuing medical education."

Handheld Computers Save Time and Resources,
Improve Data Collection for HIV Voluntary Counseling and Testing Programs

AED-SATELLIFE is working with Tebelopele, a local non-profit organization in Botswana, to improve its data collection and reporting capacity for its voluntary testing and counseling programs and for the "Door-to-Door" campaign funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), an agency of the United States government. Client intake forms are now completed directly on handheld computers (sometimes called personal digital assistants or PDAs) and the collected data is automatically uploaded daily to program databases, eliminating
errors and delays in data collection and reporting.

"Handheld computers have been in use, on a pilot basis, in Tebelopele for two months and early indications are that they have improved the quality of data and efficiency of operation. Full roll out across the organisation has begun and will be completed in the next month."
Jan Raats, Executive Director, Tebelopele
October 2007

In addition to collecting household and individual information on the handhelds in the "Door to Door"campaign, outreach workers are employing the Global Positioning System (GPS) to record the coordinates of each house they visit so that they can be mapped for future reference. Workers are also using portable barcode scanners in combination with the handheld computers to ensure that lab
results are accurately matched to households and individuals.

Because Tebelopele tests over 100,000 people a year, it has the largest data set available in Botswana to track both the epidemic and the outreach efforts to prevent new cases. When dealing with public health, greater data accuracy and faster reporting are important. With AED-SATELLIFE's assistance, the quality of
that data will be greatly improved.

For more information on using handheld computers and mobile devices, please contact us at PDAprojects@healthnet.org

This particular Satellife project helps collect data on HIV cases in Botswana. This is just one example of the Satellife projects, which use handheld computers to help carry out and document relief programs and their outcomes. As the info piece explains, data is collected and uploaded automatically to databases,and houses' coordinates are mapped, in order to ease the future management of the HIV testing and counseling program.

Idealist.org

Whether you are looking for an internship, volunteer opportunity, consultancy, or employment with a nonprofit organization, you will likely find many potential opportunities at Idealist.org.

It's motto is 'action without borders', and it provides a venue for organizations to provide information about its programs and activities, to announce vacancies and internship opportunities, and to arrange events.

There are forums for discussion, an Idealist.org blog and podcast.

One could call this 'one stop shopping' for all your activism needs.

Action without borders

Thank You, Bill

Thank You, Bill
As Bill Gates nears retirement, we consider his legacy.

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By Michael Friedenberg

February 06, 2008 — CIO — Bill Gates will officially retire from Microsoft in July. In the intervening months, a lot will be written about him, his legacy and the company he built into one of the most powerful, innovative and controversial of our time. While many will argue about the nature of the impact Gates has had in the world, no one can dispute that his impact has been enormous.

Founding a company in 1975 that now employs 78,000 people and drives revenue of $51B is remarkable. It has made millions of people wealthy from a monetary and knowledge perspective, made businesses more productive and, until recently, made Gates the wealthiest person in the world.

With the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he and his wife have chosen to give back and help the poor, needy and sick. You might not agree with everything that Microsoft does, or with Gates's vision for the future of high-tech, but there is no denying that his energy toward improving humanity is awe-inspiring. The values that the Gates Foundation rests upon—that "all lives have equal value" and "to whom much is given, much is expected"—defines what Gates will be spending his time on and why, as he waves goodbye to Microsoft.

Gates now seeks to mesh capitalism with philanthropy. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, he called for businesses to exercise a new form of "creative capitalism." Capitalism, he said, "is responsible for the incredible innovations that improve lives." But it only works "on behalf of those who can pay."

"To provide rapid improvements for the poor," he said, "we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses." He acknowledged that profit must be the incentive for business whenever possible (for sustainability) but argued that the benefit of public recognition that "enhances a company's reputation, appeals to customers and...attracts good people to the organization" is a valid incentive that should help companies invest in serving the very poor.

So while many will argue about, comment on and debate the impact of what Bill Gates has brought to business, the world or humanity, I would rather say, Thank you for everything that you have created, and I wish you success in your new journey. Our world will be a much better place if you accomplish in your new endeavors one percent of what you have already achieved.

Other stories by Michael Friedenberg
© 2008 CXO Media Inc.