Associate Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication Leslie Steeves claims that it has been a thought since 1950 — if children from third-world countries were given up-to-date technology, then they would be given the chance catch up to first-world countries in education, and in turn, economy. Most recently, the “One Laptop per Child” organization was launched, hoping to suppress the digital divide between third-world countries such as Peru and Rwanda and first-world countries. @@http://www.uoregon.edu/findpeople/person/Leslie*Steeves@@ @@http://one.laptop.org/@@

But the mission was not accomplished. The students were using the laptops as toys and weapons, many girls and young women could not use the equipment due to cultural restrictions, the teachers and trainers did not have adequate equipment or training to fix the broken computers and in many places around Africa there was no Internet access. Steeves said that the project was deployed in Peru and despite the 300,000 computers that were sent, there were no differences in reading, writing, math or science. The only difference was that kids knew how to use computers.
Senyo Ofori-Parku, a University graduate student who lived in Ghana and partially influenced Steeves’ project, has seen the project in his homeland and was not impressed. @@http://www.uoregon.edu/findpeople/person/Senyo*Ofori-Parku@@
“The fact that they don’t work is almost a given,” Ofori-Parku said. “It’s not sustainable, it burdens the country, so what drives these partnerships between the governments and the organization?”
Ofori-Parku was not convinced that the partnership between the organization and the country’s government was only to help people, but to profit the creators and distributors, Quanta Computers Inc. @@http://www.quantatw.com/Quanta/english/Default.aspx@@
“It seems like something used to make someone rich,” Ofori-Parku said. “They are just selling the laptops to us, but they frame it like, ‘It will help you, why don’t you buy it?’ They don’t seem to be helping us. On the surface, it looks like we are being helped, but I don’t think so.”
Steeves recognizes the criticism of the organization and displays it in her 25-minute documentary that she produced in winter 2010 after being given grants from the University’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Dave and Nancy Petrone fund and the School of Journalism and Communication. She visited Ghana in September 2009 and was able to wittiness the organization’s rugged XO laptop in action. She came back with information about the program’s impact on the areas where it was installed and received the grants shortly after.
“There’s a large literature critiquing development aid for being top-down with an inadequate understanding of local contexts, presuming that merely inserting technologies will solve problems,” Steeves said. “In fact over six decades of aid, many projects have failed for this reason, also resulting in economic dependency and negative side effects.”
Steeves is currently in the editing process and plans on releasing the 25-minute video later this year on YouTube.