The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program started at MIT that had the goal of creating a $100 laptop for children in developing countries has announced an offer for donors to not only donate a machine to a child in a developing country but to get one for their own child to use. The program will be for a short time in November and is revealed here. The original $100 price-tag goal, however, has been raised to $188. And the program requires you to pay $399. for the two laptops, one going to a child in a poverty-striken area and the other to you.
This gives OLPC an opportunity to expand the distribution of the laptops throughout the world while generating excitement about them among families in the developed world. For kids interested in programming, it provides an additional opportunity for developing and testing software for the machine. Presumably a separate Linux machine would be necessary for software development; not sure.
Intel's Classmate PC is their own attempt to inject a low-cost laptop into the developing world. Apparently Nigeria has adopted it in some of their villages because it runs Windows, which presumably will give high-school age students a better chance of getting work. That's Intel's claim I believe, not mine.
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Monday, September 24, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Clinical Economics
Jeffrey Sachs' description of the developing world in terms of an economic development ladder is vivid. Through engaging stories, he shows the difference between Africans in Malawi who have not a toehold on the development ladder and Bangladesh women and young Chinese professionals who are, with their countries, on the ladder and on their way to escaping poverty hopefully forever.
Early in The End of Poverty, Sachs then relates the key paradigm shift that he made and which he professes for understanding and eradicating poverty: clinical economics. His wife is a pediatrician and no doubt his observance of her skill and practice of solving late-night emergencies has helped him to develop his concept of clinical practice applied to developing country economics. Sachs took four lessons from clinical medicine: (1) the human body is a complex system, (2) complexity requires a differential diagnosis, (3)all medicine is family medicine and (4) monitoring and evaluation are essential. Just like the human body, a country's economy is a complex system and diagnosing it requires more than looking at a severe budget deficit and runaway inflation (the two symptoms of Bolivia's problems when Sachs first got involved in development consulting back in the mid-1980s). The diagnosis for Bolivia, for example, required an understanding of its economy in terms of geography (it is land-locked), its political and social systems and the fact that its primary exports have been high-dollar value per weight items such as tin which were necessary to overcome the high costs of transporting it to ports from the high Andes. If you're browsing a bookstore and come across this book, don't forget to look at the table on page 84 entitled "Checklist for Making a Differential Diagnosis." Pretty comprehensive. Sachs is one of the main players in the Millenium Development Goals, a UN initiative to eradicate extreme poverty and improve the health of people around the world.
Early in The End of Poverty, Sachs then relates the key paradigm shift that he made and which he professes for understanding and eradicating poverty: clinical economics. His wife is a pediatrician and no doubt his observance of her skill and practice of solving late-night emergencies has helped him to develop his concept of clinical practice applied to developing country economics. Sachs took four lessons from clinical medicine: (1) the human body is a complex system, (2) complexity requires a differential diagnosis, (3)all medicine is family medicine and (4) monitoring and evaluation are essential. Just like the human body, a country's economy is a complex system and diagnosing it requires more than looking at a severe budget deficit and runaway inflation (the two symptoms of Bolivia's problems when Sachs first got involved in development consulting back in the mid-1980s). The diagnosis for Bolivia, for example, required an understanding of its economy in terms of geography (it is land-locked), its political and social systems and the fact that its primary exports have been high-dollar value per weight items such as tin which were necessary to overcome the high costs of transporting it to ports from the high Andes. If you're browsing a bookstore and come across this book, don't forget to look at the table on page 84 entitled "Checklist for Making a Differential Diagnosis." Pretty comprehensive. Sachs is one of the main players in the Millenium Development Goals, a UN initiative to eradicate extreme poverty and improve the health of people around the world.
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