Tech support: Some church officials keen about One Laptop Per Child

Published: 2007-10-30

ROME (CNS) -- A plan to equip the world's poorest schoolchildren with a low-cost, rugged, portable, wireless laptop has found some enthusiastic support among the Jesuits and in the Vatican. Vatican officials, ambassadors to the Vatican, and representatives of the world's religious orders were among the more than 200 people attending an Oct. 29 conference highlighting the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The conference was sponsored by the communications office of Rome's Jesuit headquarters and two commissions of the international organization of superiors general of religious orders. Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit organization, originally looked to individual nations to buy massive quantities of the XO laptop that governments would then distribute free of charge to school kids. While a number of developing nations initially jumped on board to buy the laptops, Negroponte said he soon discovered "there's a big difference between a head of state agreeing to do a million laptops and the state sending the $200 million check." While Uruguay has since become the first country to buy 100,000 of the first 300,000 laptops that begin production Nov. 2, Negroponte has widened the list of potential buyers to include individuals and religious orders. Some 7,000 older laptops have been used in pilot projects around the world.

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