Laptop Per Child Intervention

Global Measures:

To bridge the gap that Economy causes in the digital divide, companies have gradually begun to develop cheaper technology which would be made available to those who cannot afford the equipment they need to connect to the internet and thus make the internet more widely available to the peoples of that country. More recently, certain initiatives such as ‘One laptop per child’ have been developed. The aim of this initiative (which largely relies on forms of crowdfunding such as donations), is to provide children born into poorer communities with a purpose-built laptop, in order to learn vital computer skills and aid vital areas of their education. The laptops are built with durability in mind in order to survive the rigours of

The One laptop per child initiative has provided many laptops to various countries across the world, and has recorded statistics for each country it has provided to. Some examples include; Cameroon (1,600 devices), Rwanda (110,000 devices) and Brazil (2,600 devices) – as shown on this interactive map; http://one.laptop.org/map, which shows to me that this initiative has already shown its potential, and that when it is more widely used by countries across the world that it can bridge the gap caused by Economy to the greatest extent. Furthermore, as more technology is developed over time, it will become more cost effective to provide these children with more powerful devices allowing for the use of more sophisticated software, allowing them to push the boundaries of what they can learn and show off, and with more funding in the future, the One laptop per child initiative will be able to cover more areas with devices and allow more schoolchildren to share in the experiences of those already using these devices to broaden the scope

One such example is Google’s Project Loon; http://www.google.com/loon/ which aims to provide mobile networks and internet all over the world via the use of routers connected to large balloons, which which travel using wind currents in the stratosphere (roughly 20km above the surface). Each balloon is designed to last for 100 days before it is decommisioned and replaced, which shows that the project is reliable and designed to last a reasonable length of time (respective to each device). Furthermore, this means that wireless internet will be easily accessible in areas where broadband cannot be installed as cheaply, or at all in some cases, such as in deserts or around mountainous areas. The idea set forward by Project Loon is that the network of balloons would provide as much space with internet and mobile network access as possible, and as a result, the developers have recorded test data from balloons that have travelled thousands of kilometers. I believe that Project Loon is a cost effective way of bridging the digital divide caused by geographical reasons, and that it is an appropriate solution which requires far less work, as all that is required is the balloons (which have already been designed) and various pieces of hardware such as wireless routers to be manufactured at a rate which is suitable to that of the rate at which the balloons are being