One Laptop per Child Adds New Board Member

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One Laptop per Child, a non-profit organization focused on providing educational tools to help children in developing countries “learn learning,” announced today the appointment to its Board of Directors of Jorge G. Castañeda, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico.

“After a momentous 2007 in which we began mass production and funded the delivery of more than 100,000 XO laptops to some of the world’s poorest nations, OLPC is restructuring in order to provide access to modern learning to a much greater number of children worldwide”

“After a momentous 2007 in which we began mass production and funded the delivery of more than 100,000 XO laptops to some of the world’s poorest nations, OLPC is restructuring in order to provide access to modern learning to a much greater number of children worldwide,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “Jorge Castañeda’s extensive international expertise will be invaluable in helping OLPC fulfill its mission. We are delighted that he has accepted our invitation to join the Board.”

According to Jorge G. Castañeda, “It is a great honor for me to contribute to this extraordinary initiative led by Nicolas Negroponte and to support the cause of children’s education in Mexico and Latin America.”

Jorge G. Castañeda was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He is a renowned public intellectual, political scientist, and prolific writer. Dr. Castañeda received a B.A. from Princeton University and a B.A. from Universite de Paris-I (Pantheon-Sorbonne), an M.A. from the Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes, and his Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Paris-I. He taught at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) from 1978 through 2004, at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, and (since 1997) at New York University.

Dr. Castañeda was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1985-87) and was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant Recipient (1989-1991). He is a regular columnist for the Mexican daily Reforma, the Spanish daily El País and Newsweek International. In 1997 he was appointed Global Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at New York University. He has been a Member of the Board of Human Rights Watch since 2003.

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.