There has recently been a lot of comment on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project for developing countries promoted by Dr. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. Nigeria recently committed US$100,000,000 to the purchase of 1,000,000 units of the laptop, generating mostly negative comments from many Nigerians, who feel that the money could have been better spent on the provision of classrooms and teachers.

I disagree with these comments, but I also believe that the project needs to be re-designed if it is to succeed.

Firstly, in as much as Nigeria has elected to provide western education to its children, and in as much as Nigeria has elected to be part of the global economy, failure to equip its citizens with the requisite tools for learning and participation in that economy, will be a gross abdication of its responsibilities to its citizens (not that Nigerian governments have any reputation of living up to their responsibilities in any case). The OLPC project is one of the cheapest and most effective ways in which the government can deliver on these responsibilities.

Failure in the twenty-first century to furnish children with this modern literacy tool would be akin to failure to provide children with pencils, and failure to teach children reading or writing skills, on account of the priority being the provision of classrooms and teachers. While the children wait for classrooms and teachers, if they must in the interim use their computers in the shade of a tree, then so be it. If they must use their computers under tutelage by their older siblings reading by light from oil lanterns, then so be it. But for the sake of their future, and for the sake of the future of Nigeria, give the children those computers, and let them learn to use them.

Some antagonists of the OLPC project have also pointed to the absence of electricity. Recall that the nay-sayers once said that mobile phones would not work in Africa on account of lack of steady electricity. We're now all the wiser. And before they point to the profit motive as the driver of the success of the telecoms sector, what the Nigerian government must do, is to become the project's customer, making an on-going commitment to the education and the future of our children.

The OLPC project may however indeed be inappropriate and ill-advised the way it is currently designed, but for a reason that the Indian government official and some other contributors to this debate fail to grasp. The reason is that the project has not been designed with a full understanding of the environment in which it is expected to operate. It is surprising, albeit understandable, that the promoters of the project seem to have missed one of the most life-changing technological developments in most of Africa, one which, had they taken it into consideration in their designs, would have silenced critics of the project. I will return to the issue of what that development is shortly, but first, let me address what in my opinion, is a major flaw, a shocking one for people who claim to be IT experts, in the reasons adduced for concluding that the OLPC laptop is underpowered.

Although they don't say so explicitly, it is clear that these critics have arrived at their conclusion based on the assumption that the laptop will be running Microsoft's bloated and inefficient software. Some who argue in favour of the project also suffer from this lack of the most rudimentary knowledge of the dynamics of their professed profession when they support their argument by quoting the hardware requirements for Microsoft's software. It is common knowledge that the OLPC laptop will run a version of the free and open source Linux operating system, and it therefore goes without saying that the application software will also be free and open source.

This has several advantages, the easiest to see of which is the zero cost. Another advantage is even more profound and far-reaching, and that is the open-source nature of the software. This affords the children, or members of their household who would otherwise not qualify to get the laptop, to poke at the source code of the software, thereby learning programming, and potentially creating localised versions of the software, and even entirely new software. Now, if that is not empowering, I don't know what is.

Now, let me return to how the OLPC project could have been designed to be more viable by taking advantage of existing technological developments. As I pointed out earlier, the telecoms sector has enjoyed unprecedented growth and penetration in the developing world, and in Nigeria in particular. The OLPC project must take advantage of this success in two ways:

1. By modifying the broadband modem in the OLPC into one that connects to a broadband infrastructure based around the existing mobile phone base towers, atop which are mounted antennas for a new broadband infrastructure. Such a broadband infrastructure has the potential to provide bandwidths far in excess of the bandwidths being proposed for the OLPC laptop.
2. Rather than have applications installed locally on the laptop, the applications will be installed on a network of servers acting pretty much like a power grid, ready to be delivered to the laptop for running. The Linux technology that supports this, the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is extensively deployed in thousands of schools all over the world. The specifications for OLPC laptop are far in excess of the requirements for the client computers on an LTSP network.

By re-designing the project as an end-to-end system as I've proposed, one in which the laptop is only a client workstation, the project becomes immune to the disease of constant updates and upgrades enforced by slavery to Microsoft's bloated, inefficient, and insecure software, which governments all over the world are turning away from, especially when it comes to educational software.

Moving the OLPC project to an LTSP architecture has the potential to create, or at the least empower Nigerians who wish to create educational content. The bottom line will be that the OLPC project will empower not only the children, but also a cadre of content creators, and perhaps more importantly and more far-reaching, will promote the development of educational software that is appropriate to the needs of Nigerian children.