A US$30 million BOONDOGGLE

Apr 27, 2011 Letters

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Dear editor,
A boondoggle is a project that arguably wastes time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy motivations.(Google: Wikipedia)
The OLPF project costing the Guyanese nation $30 million is a classic boondoggle. This project calls for the handout of 90,000 laptops to selected Guyanese families. This project has not been debated or approved by the parliament. And, no study has been  done to evaluate the benefits, if any, of this project. Whether the $30 million is a donation from a foreign government or taken from the treasury (tax revenue), an expenditure of this magnitude representing four percent of the budget should be voted on and approved by the parliament.
The absence of a national debate on this project also means that the project details have not been vetted, and if proven to be lacking or deficient could not be amended or improved. Setting national policy without the involvement of parliament is precisely what invites the comparison of Guyana to a Banana Republic.
The idea of giving laptops to school children in third world countries started some 10 years ago, and is known as OLPC (One laptop per child). The project had been popularized by Nicholas Negroponte and calls for the building of a cheap prototype computer known as XO-1 for a price of $100.
There are tons of stuff on Negroponte and OLPC on the world-wide-web. Reviewing the material, Negroponte comes off as a snake oil salesman whose project has (1) snowballed and ended in failure; (2) Of all the countries that were sold on the project, there has been no record of success, namely, that learning has been enhanced.
Some Excerpts: “At a U.N. conference in Tunisia from November 16–18, 2005, several African officials, most notably Marthe Dansokho of Cameroon and Mohammed Diop of Mali, voiced suspicions towards the motives of the OLPC project and claimed that the project was using an overly U.S. mindset that presented solutions not applicable to specifically African problems.
Dansokho said that the project demonstrated misplaced priorities, stating that clean water and schools were more important for African women, whom, he stated, would not have time to use the computers to research new crops to grow.
Diop specifically attacked the project as an attempt to exploit the governments of poor nations by making them pay for hundreds of millions of machines. Others have similarly criticized laptop deployments in very low income countries, regarding them as cost-ineffective when compared to far simpler measures such as deworming and other expenses on basic child health.
“Lee Felsenstein, a computer engineer who played a central role in the development of the personal computer, criticized the centralized, top-down design and distribution of the OLPC, calling it “imperialistic”.
“John Wood, founder of Room to Read emphasizes affordability and scalability over high-tech solutions. While in favour of the One Laptop per Child initiative for providing education to children in the developing world at a cheaper rate, he has pointed out that a $2,000 library can serve 400 children, costing just $5 a child to bring access to a wide range of books in the local languages (such as Khmer or Nepali) and English; also, a $10,000 school can serve 400–500 children ($20–$25 a child).
According to Wood, these are more appropriate solutions for education in the dense forests of Vietnam or rural Cambodia.
“The OLPC project has also been criticized for allegedly adopting a “one-shot” deployment approach with little or no technical support or teacher training, and for neglecting pilot programmes and formal assessment of outcomes in favour of quick deployment. Some authors attribute this unconventional approach to the OLPC promoters’ alleged focus on constructivist education and ‘digital utopianism’.
“The organisation’s strategy of simply giving underprivileged children laptops and “walking away” has been criticised because “laptops are getting opened and turned on, but then kids and teachers are getting frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don’t understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner.”
This “drive-by” implementation model is the official strategy of the OLPC project, and the mantra “You Can Give Kids XO Laptops and Just Walk Away” are Negroponte’s own words.
“According to a previous intern, teachers in Peru were given very limited training on how to both use and fix the laptops. The intern observed that in most cases software and hardware issues would result in students becoming too frustrated with the laptops to want to continue working with them.
“As is the case with other proprietary and open-source software, there are bugs present in the OLPC’s pre-installed programmes and the Sugar OS. This is not anything new, however the organisation has been criticised for its lack of troubleshooting support. Teachers in Peru are told to handle problems in one of two ways. If the problem is a software issue, they are to flash the computer, and if it is a hardware problem, they are to report it.
In the classroom environment this black-boxing approach is being criticised for causing the teachers and students to feel disconnected with, and confused by the laptop, which results, in many cases, in the laptops eventually going unused.
Several defects in OLPC XO-1 hardware have emerged in the field, and laptop repair is often neglected by students or their families (who are responsible for maintenance) due to the relatively high cost of some components (such as displays)”. End of excerpts.
I make this simple appeal to President Jagdeo:
(1)    Laptops to families will not enhance learning. A simple study of the OLPC worldwide experience over the last 10-years will confirm this conclusion.
(2)    Most of the 90,000 labtops will be broken, damaged or stolen in less than three years.
(3)    Please consider setting up computer labs with desktops – at least one lab in each high school.
(4)    Design an ICT curriculum which must be integrated with the general academic curriculum.
(5)    The Computer Science Dept. of the University of Guyana has the collective experience and skills to set-up and monitor the labs – as well as to provide training for an adequate supply of computer teachers to staff all the high schools throughout Guyana.
Thirty million dollars spent on setting up labs, servicing labs, teacher-training and designing an ICT curriculum will guarantee a truly transformative educational and technology experience for Guyana’s current generation of high school students.
Mike Persaud.

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