ROME (CNS): A plan to equip the world’s poorest school children with a low-cost, rugged, portable, wireless laptop has found some enthusiastic support among the Jesuits and in the Vatican.
Vatican officials, ambassadors to the Vatican, and representatives of the world’s religious orders were among the more than 200 people attending an October 29 conference highlighting the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
The conference was sponsored by the communications office of Rome’s Jesuit headquarters and two commissions of the international organisation of superiors general of religious orders.
Founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit organisation Nicholas Negroponte originally looked to individual nations to buy massive quantities of the XO laptop that governments would then distribute free of charge to school kids.
While a number of developing nations initially jumped on board to buy the laptops, Mr Negroponte said he soon discovered “there’s a big difference between a head of state agreeing to do a million laptops and the state sending the $200 million cheque”.
While Uruguay has since become the first country to buy 100,000 of the first 300,000 laptops that begin production on November 2, Mr Negroponte has widened the list of potential buyers to include individuals and religious orders.
Some 7000 older laptops have been used in pilot projects around the world.
“There are 50 million students in the Catholic Church’s school systems”, which include children in some very poor parts of the world, Mr Negroponte told CNS on October 29.
He said he would like to “get the Church to directly participate and maybe provide (the laptops) to kids in very poor countries, in very remote areas”.
Another invited speaker, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Paul Poupard, said “a lack of education is as serious as a lack of food”.
Mr Negroponte said individuals can go online at www.laptop.org to purchase any number of XO laptops to donate to children in poorer nations.
