From Newsvine:
Peru’s equipping of more than 800,000 public schoolchildren in this rugged Andean nation with low-cost laptops ranks among the world’s most ambitious efforts to leverage digital technology in the fight against poverty.
Yet five years in, there are serious doubts about whether the largest single deployment in the One Laptop Per Child initiative inspired by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte was worth the more than $200 million that Peru’s government spent.
Ill-prepared rural teachers and administrators were too often unable to fathom much less teach with the machines, software bugs didn’t get fixed, Internet access was almost universally absent and cultural disconnects kept kids from benefitting from the machines.
“In essence, what we did was deliver the computers without preparing the teachers,” said Sandro Marcone, the Peruvian education official who now runs the program.
He believes the missteps may have actually widened the gap between children able to benefit from the computers and those ill-equipped to do so, he says, in a country whose public education system is rated among the world’s most deficient.
Like most of the programs to help underprivileged people, cities, or countries, this programs was doomed to failure from the start.
The failures mentioned in this article could have been easily foreseen, as in other “help” programs. Why are these programs put into practice when doomed to failure for obvious reasons?
Because they are not designed to help THE people; they are designed to help the persons who are promoting the programs.
Whether it is governments, NCOs, or private institutions, the value of these programs is to get their names in news.
Having been born and lived in Latin America for many of my 65 years, I have seen these projects come and go. And yes, they do go… away.
From garbage trucks for Guayaquil to coastal reforestation, millions have been spent with a net outcome of zero.
Could someone name one project put out to help people in Latin America that has actually achieved its goals?