One Laptop per Child
non-profit initiative
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative that operated from 2005 to 2014 with the goal of transforming education for children around the world by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.
When the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so achieving this objective required bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer. The housing was styled by Yves Béhar with Continuum, now EPAM Continuum. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, and Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support. After disappointing sales, the hardware design part of the organization shut down in 2014.
The OLPC project was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English.
It was criticized for its US-centric focus ignoring bigger problems, high total costs, low focus on maintainability and training and its limited success. A large-scale randomized study of 531 primary schools in rural Peru over 10 years found no significant effects on academic performance, primary and secondary completion, or university enrollment.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q842120. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “One Laptop per Child” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.