IXL Social Enterprise Case Studies Education January 2012 | Page 9

Revolutionizing the way to make education affordable for everyone

Sri Lanka shows promise
The small island country, just off the southeast of
India, has been struggling with internal strife for
years, and is still recovering from the devastation
of the 2004 tsunami. One of the main goals of its
Ministry of Education has been to provide the
younger generation with skills in Information
Technology and the English language. This was one
of the key drivers for the collaboration with OLPC
and launch of the program that was planned to bring
1,250 new laptops to students in thirteen separate
schools around Sri Lanka as a pilot project. This pilot
program has received strong support by the World
Bank.
In early 2008 a non-profit foundation called Lanka
OLPC Foundation was established. The Sri Lanka
Ministry of Education (MOE) pilots the One Laptop
per Child (OLPC) program by purchasing laptops
from the OLPC Foundation, with funding from the
World Bank, and distributing them to students in
selected primary schools throughout the country.
The Ministry of Education has chosen primary
schools around Sri Lanka for the pilot project and is
working in cooperation with a coalition of corporate
donors (such as the Chart Foundation, Hatton
National Bank and mobile provider Tigo) to get the
project up and running. On December 10, 2009, Sri
Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Education
Minister Premajayantha presented the first 400
laptops at a public ceremony announcing the pilot
program.
While the overall progress of OLPC’s global vision
has been steady and promising, the program has yet
to really catch fire with many groups of stakeholders
globally: teachers, parents, and government officials.
Sources:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/node/551,
accessed November 3, 2011; http://blog.laptop.
org/2009/09/13/updates-from-sri-lanka/,
accessedNovember 3, 2011; http://blog.laptop.
org/2009/12/10/sri-lankan-president-launches-anational-xo-program/, accessed November 3, 2011

Piloted programs to build a bigger coalition
Sri Lanka and Peru demonstrate another key
success factor: setting up a high profile pilot that
demonstrates success on a small scale and creates
the possibility for expansion on a broader scale
within the country.
Found alternate donors to fund laptops
OLPC also used innovative marketing to get
more XOs to developing countries. The effort
was called the “Give One Get One” campaign
(see Figure 4) and ran from November 12

through December 31, 2007 and from November
17 through December 31, 2008 in the U.S. and
Canada. For $399 a consumer could buy two
computers: one to own and one to give to a child
in a developing country. The 2007 campaign
raised $35 million and a total of more than
100,000 XO laptops were distributed to children
in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti,
Mongolia and Rwanda.35 However, the 2008
campaign raised only $2.5 million, much less
than expected given the previous year’s success.36
OLPC believed this was not a sustainable
business model going forward.37

A successful pilot in Arahuay, Peru
Peru’s purchase of more than 513,000 XO laptops so far is part of the educational intervention model spearheaded
by the General Directorate of Educational Technologies to try and solve two fundamental challenges in Peru. First,
increase the quality of overall education in Peru and second to reduce the gap in education between public and
private schools, between urban and rural regions and generally between the rich and the poor.
Given these objectives, Peru initially targeted remote, rural areas – typically areas having high rates of poverty and
illiteracy. Peru ran a pilot program with 60 XOs in Arahuay, a village in the Andes Mountains . The program has had
some early success based on a study in May 2009. The study reported a 50% improvement in reading comprehension
and 60% textual and mathematical analysis . Peru also won the UNESCO prize for the OLPC program in 2009.
In 2010, Peru passed Uruguay as the largest deployment of XOs in the world. However, it will not be a 1:1
deployment as in Uruguay; instead, the laptops will be placed in Technology Resource Centers where children
can access them at assigned schedules. Despite the program facing some challenges generally associated with all
educational ICT programs including technology infrastructure, planning and training , Oscar Becerra, head of
the General Directorate of Educational Technologies, believes that the program will be a key factor in improving
education in Peru.
Sources:
http://www.perueduca.edu.pe/olpc/OLPC_fundamentopedag.html; https://edutechdebate.org/olpc-in-southamerica/olpc-in-peru-one-laptop-per-child-problems/; http://laptop.org/en/children/countries/peru.shtml; https://
edutechdebate.org/olpc-in-south-america/olpc-in-peru-one-laptop-per-child-problems/; http://edutechdebate.
org/computer-configurations-for-learning/what-is-reasonable-to-expect-from-information-and-communicationtechnologies-in-education/, all accessed November 14, 2011.

Figure 4. Ad for the Give One Get One Program

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