One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization focused on providing educational tools to help children in developing countries “learn learning,” announced today the results of its Give One Get One campaign that ran from November 12 through December 31, 2007 in the United States and Canada. In total, the campaign raised $35 million and more than 100,000 XO laptops are already in the process of being distributed to children in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Mongolia and Rwanda.

“We are extremely grateful to everyone who participated in our giving campaign”

“We are extremely grateful to everyone who participated in our giving campaign,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “The generous response was overwhelming and significantly helps us move forward our mission of getting laptops into the hands of as many underprivileged children as possible. Give One Get One also quickly broadened the global community of XO laptop users and we’re already getting lots of feedback and creative input about ways to improve the laptop even further.”

In addition to making it possible to seed the launch of programs in a number of countries, the Give One Get One campaign greatly expanded community participation in the project. The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in OLPC forums, chat rooms, email lists and wiki has risen dramatically. Give One Get One participants have asked lots of questions – and have uncovered some new bugs – but they also have lots of answers and have submitted some new software patches. The community model is scaling.

About One Laptop per Child

One Laptop per Child (OLPC at http://www.laptop.org) is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. These XO laptops are rugged, open source, and so energy efficient that they can be powered by a child manually. Mesh networking gives many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal is $100.