MDGs Progress and Challenges in Rwanda, 2008
Kigali- President Paul Kagame Launches One Laptop Per Child, 2 Oct 2008.
Rwanda recently officially launched the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative that the government in Kigali committed to last year. The ambitious programme is targeting 80 per cent or 2.5 million children in five years' time.
Presiding over the launch, President Paul Kagame said the government will purchase 50,000 XO laptops under the project by early 2009 and that the financing is already being secured.
The XO computers, also known as the "$100 laptop," are sold to governments through the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative to equip schools, where each student will own a laptop. The price of each laptop was originally $188, and was expected to go down to $100 by the end of this year.
According to President Kagame, Rwanda has already purchased 5,000 laptops at a cost of $500,000 and distributed them to schools in three districts in a pilot project. The government will spend up to about $250 million by 2012 if all the targeted children receive laptops by the stipulated time.
The One-Laptop-Per-Child project is a non-profit scheme unveiled in Tunis in 2005 by the then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the founder and chairperson of the initiative Prof Nicholas Negroponte, during the UN-sponsored World Summit on an Information Society.
The objective of the scheme is to make low-cost computers available to people in developing countries.
Rwanda became the third country in Africa to commit to the laptop initiative when President Kagame held talks with Prof Negroponte in January 2007. The other two are Libya and Nigeria. Outside Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand and Uruguay have also committed to the XO laptop initiative. Speaking at the official launch, Prof Negroponte said Rwanda was the first country to launch the XO laptop project and that it would be used as a model for Africa.
A primary school in Kagugu in Rwanda was the first to receive the laptops in Africa. According to Richard Niyonkuru, monitoring and evaluation advisor to the ICT Department in the Ministry of Education, Rwanda has already run a trial project of the initiative with about 106 XO laptops in Rwamgana. Mr Niyonkuru said the findings showed that pupils have benefited from the laptops.
The XO computer, a learning tool created for children in developing countries, is a rugged, low-power computer that uses a flash memory instead of a hard drive and runs Linux open source software as the operating system.
With the XO mobile ad-hoc networking, many laptops can share Internet access from one connection. The laptop was designed by experts from both academia and industry to specifically serve all aspects of the non-profit humanitarian project.
The executive Director of the Rwanda Information Technology Authority, Nkubito Bakuramutsa, said the agency, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, is co-ordinating the efforts to translate the XO laptop's interface into Kinyarwanda as well. According to officials at the authority, the initiative will strengthen the quality of already existing free and compulsory primary education by adopting new tools for learning and engaging children more directly, both inside and outside school.
Carine Umutesi, the co-ordinator of the project, said, "Our motivation is helping children learn and giving them an opportunity to participate in the laptop programm."
The Rwanda government's intention is to move children from physical books to an electronic format where a much wider body of knowledge will be made available to learners than was previously possible or economically feasible with printed textbooks. As part of the government's stated vision of transforming Rwanda into a knowledge-based economy by the year 2020, the Ministry of Infrastructure, Ministry of Education, and the Minister of Science and Technology and Research in the President's Office, are the institutions collaborating with the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative.
Rwanda has embraced ICT as key to the country's future economic growth.
President Kagame recently announced that all Rwandan schools will be networked by 2013 and equipped with standard ICT tools and trained facilitators. Quanta Computer, the project's contract manufacturer said that it had confirmed orders for one million units from the seven countries committed to the initiative.
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Rwanda
