One Laptop Per Child Talks

At DLD (Digital, Life, Design), Europe's "conference for the 21st century" at HVB Forum in Munich, Germany, Negroponte spoke in the panel "How to Be Good" on his views on the world's children:

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's "Digital Life Design: How to be good" panel discussion.

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Martin Varsavsky: So tonight is the start of my career as a moderator and interviewer. I have done too many panels and I thought it would be interesting to interview other people and to see what they had to say about how to be good. It thing being good is hard. Just ask Bill Gates about how hard it is to be good.

It's an endeavor; it takes a lot of work. I think people are trying to be good - many times they harm, and that's whey even when you sign the Hippocratic Oath you say that you are not going to harm. Obviously most doctors thought that they were going to do good. I think that doing good requires strategy. We're going to hear about three strategies here that, in my opinion, work out to a good example of what it is to do good. Our panelists - I prefer that they introduce themselves, so I'm going to start by a brief introduction by each one.

We're going to have each panelist introduce themselves. We're going to go from left to right here so we're going to start with Steve. I also understand that Steve has a short video to show. I hope that it works. So, why don't you please introduce yourselves, let's get started with Steve, and then we'll go into a Q & A that will first involve myself and then all of you. So please Steve, go ahead.

Steve Mariotti: [Walks up to podium] Hello, can you hear me? Good! I'm so glad to be here today. I wanted to tell you that for the last 26 years I've been working on how to teach low-income children how to set up small business. Today I just want to show you a real quick (it's about 2 minutes) video - but it will save me a lot of time if I show that. So, I'll go to the video.

[Video ends] Martin Varsavsky: Thank you! [applause] Thank you! So, I founded NFTE in 1987, and it's become a big deal in America. We have also replicated it in 17 countries overseas. The goal is over the next 30-40 years is that every low-income child in the world will learn how to start a small business.

Three quick points related to technology: First point, the magic of technology is making it much easier for low-income people to start businesses. It's lowered barriers to entries and done a whole bunch of really positive things for small business. So, I salute the technology pioneers. I think that it's wonderful that we try to teach as much technology as we possibly can.

The second point is that in my opinion the ultimate technology is to teach people how to own and create assists. Technology should always be viewed as the tool, something that should be kept in perspective and that is used to help people, particularly free up their time and energy to do whatever they want with their life.

The third point I want to make as an educator is that with as wonderful as technology is and as incredible as it's going to be for our futures, I think that someone who specializes in 14, 15, 16-year-old young people, particularly those at risk, you have to be very careful where they don't fall into the world where they're constantly online. I've seen a lot of tragedies there. It's got to be balanced.

There are many, many other things in life that involve talking to people and actually communicating directly and experiences, and exercise and sports. So, I'm happy to be here today and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank You.

[Applause]

Martin Varsavsky: So, before you go, you can sit down, I have a question. I understand that they'll make this work eventually. So, if a kid is not old enough to get a driver's license, isn't it dangerous to have him run a business? Steve Mariotti: Can you all hear me when I respond?

OK, good, they got that one. Actually I think the younger you start a child in thinking about how to satisfy other people's needs in a market and the younger they start selling a very simple product and keeping track of records, and they know what the economics of one unit is, which I think is the most important thing to teach a child. I think the younger the better.

All the businesses that we teach kids how to start, which are about 4,000, are all very simple businesses with limited liability, really none. It's great to get them started, I think. Martin Varsavsky: So, thanks, Steve. Gavin, would like to introduce yourself, tell us what you do at Hewlett-Packard?

Gavin: Yeah, I think its working. So, good afternoon. Is this too loud? So, I guess working for Hewlett-Packard I am representing the global companies in this panel. At first observation here, if you look at the largest 100 economies in the world 51 are multinational and only 49 are nation states so we do have a role to play. The question is: "How do you go about it?"

And we found over the years that just writing out philanthropic checks is really not making a difference. We have to; first of all, have this aligned to your business. For 50 years we've had global citizenship as part of our business objectives. So, it's not something that's hip today and gone tomorrow. It needs to be long-term. It also needs to be aligned to your business per se.

We are the largest IT Company in the world. We have 150,000 people, a lot of products and services and so forth to bring to the plate, and that's really what we're bringing when we look at our global citizenship efforts. Most important however in all of this work is that whatever we do we cannot do alone. We have to this together with governments and NGOs.

An example would be that one of the biggest issues that Eastern Europe, the Balkan States, or Africa have is that their best brains leave the country. So, together with UNESCO we are driving a program that says "Stop the Brain Drain." We let students and professor's hook up to a computing grid whereby they can use this computing power to do this research and to create online communities.

We work with a [NEPT] with equipping 600,000 schools in Africa with ICT with a curriculum that goes with it. Or, we're working with micro-enterprises to help them not only learn how to run their businesses but how to use IT to do that. So, these are classrooms settings where people can actually learn how to use IT to do a marketing plan, or to do an accounting plan, or to just do that in combination. Martin Varsavsky: Here's a question I have for you.

I was thinking about Hewlett-Packard with revenues of $91 billion a year, mostly out of computers, and a lot of them are laptops. And, there's this gentleman on your left, Nicholas Negroponte, who is about to introduce himself, who has this amazing project "One Laptop per Child" in which, if he succeeds in giving one laptop per child for every child on the planet, would he leave you out of business or create a business for you? Gavin: I don't think that would get us out of business.

I also think that what we're doing right now is not too different from what Nicholas is planning. As I said, we are working with [NEPAT?] on equipping 600,000 schools. But, it's not just giving them a laptop but it's really looking at: "What do they do with it?" So, you have to a curriculum, training. You've got to localize and you've got to work with these local companies,

NGOs, and governments and all to make sure that people know how to use technology. We found that this is working very well for us.

Martin Varsavsky: Nicholas, I think it's your turn now. Please introduce yourself to people who of course already probably know you. But let's get on to the "One Laptop per Child" project though and talk about that.

Nicholas Negroponte: Well, somebody introduced me recently as the "Good Bin Laden" and this has indeed sort of seemed to be the case because some people look at the $100 Laptop as a form of terrorism. It has terrorized the industry in many ways. I look at the problem in the following way.

You are not going to have peace in the world as long as you have poverty. And, the only way to eliminate poverty is education. If you focus on education, particularly primary education, along the way you are going to have other second-order effects like the environment, like lowering the cost of health education, lots of things. If you focus on education you can do a great deal more than if you look other places to solve the particular problem.

There are 1.2 billion children in the world. Fifty percent of them don't have electricity, 50% of them live in the rural parts of the world. The reason that's important is that when you live in a rural part of a poor nation, even though that poverty is a much better form of poverty than urban poverty which is the absolute worse, it's also so primitive that children will often have as a school a tree.

Or some of the teachers won't show up, or the teachers will have a 6th-Grade education at best. So, if you look at that and you say to yourself: "How do I fix that? How do I deal with that?" It is not by training teachers, it is not by building schools. In all due respect, it's not about curriculum or content.

It's about levering the children themselves. Children are extraordinary - we don't give children enough credit for what they can do. I mean, we all know when your cell phone breaks you give it to a 12 year old, when you don't know how to use your laptop you ask your kid. We all know that! And yet we sort of think that they have to, after the age of 6, stop learning by doing and learn by being told.

And, in the best of situations, a child in the developing world is in a classroom 2 1/2 hours a day, five days a week, which averages a lot less than 2 hours a day over the week. So, even if you make that experience better, you're only dealing with a small part of the problem. So what we did, we said to ourselves: "How can we actually leverage the child for a lot bigger part of the day, and do something particularly for the poor children in remote parts of the developing world?" And we set to do what we call the "$100 Laptop".

The reason we did that versus telecommunications, is that telecommunications is going in so many different ways, whether it's Wimax, WiFi, some of the new satellite concepts using 3G, etc. There are many things happening. And I can maybe move some deck chairs around, make a little effect, but that's happening. The laptop wasn't happening.

One of the reasons the laptop wasn't happening is that there is a phenomenon which I highly respect. I understand where it comes from. In full disclosure please note that I am a board member of Motorola, we do this at Motorola! And what is this? This is something that HP does. The natural tendency of electronics, we all know, is to drop in price roughly 100% every 18 months.

This is really its natural tendency, to do this. So, what do you do? You add features. You add features and you hope that you add features fast enough so that at least you keep it stable, maybe even raise the price a little. I don't belittle that phenomenon. That's a very natural phenomenon. Then, add to that phenomenon a second natural phenomenon that is a computer programmer writes a piece of software. What do they do? They want to make it better. How do they make it better? They add features! And they do this invariably.

Every new piece of software in my mind is distinctly worse than the predecessor. It's fatter, and it's got this and that. So, suddenly, the fat lady can't sing! It's like a very fat person who is using most of their muscles to move their fat. So, if you look at these two situations - trying to get laptops connected to kids in rural places and trying to get the price down, you have to rethink a laptop completely. This isn't a matter of just looking at component costs.

There are two ways of making an inexpensive device, as applies to a laptop. You take cheap labor, cheap design, cheap components, and make a cheap laptop. This is done all the time. If you travel in India and China you see cheap machines that are cheap in the pejorative sense as well as the literal sense. There's a second way to do it. The second way is very rarely done.

The second way is to take very large scale integration, take really cool and interesting design, and take a very advanced manufacturing process where you pour chemicals into one end of the factory and just spew out bipods at the other end, and then take very large numbers. The key is large numbers. What you can then do is to make something that actually isn't a low-cost laptop only it's actually a pretty advanced and interesting product.

So, that's what we set out to do as a nonprofit. Very important; we are a nonprofit organization. Steven and I last night at dinner even argued about this. Because being a nonprofit organization is very important I draw no salary. Somebody said to me when I started: "You must be profit-making, because you will be sustainable and get good people."

Rubbish! My COO earns $200,000 a year, which is not very high. I was looking for a CFO recently, how could I find a CFO that's really good for under $200,000 a year? So, I put out a job description at zero salary, and the queue for the job was endless! People who had such extraordinary careers and wanted to be the CFO of "One Laptop per Child".

So in fact, it's very sustainable at least to get it rolling. So, that's the quick story. It's launching in eight countries. There are a couple of corporations that have been quite outspokenly against it - I think that's a little silly. It's a little bit like arguing against the Red Cross because you don't use Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids, but that's OK. By being a nonprofit our moral purpose is year and I think that the heads of state around the world that are advocating this and are now part of it as a movement is really very, very important because it's different than going in.

HP has shareholders, I have no shareholders. And I picked HP as a name, it could be IBM, anybody, they have shareholders. They have to look at children as a market. I look at children as a mission. It's very, very different. So, maybe Steve and I will go back and forth on this, but I think that the "One Laptop per Child's I'd like to leave with you as an impression

And, such a big group, I actually have a working, assembled model with me... Not model, sorry, I have the habit of calling it a model. It's not a model, this is really one that came off the assembly line, it's actually machine No. 5 - and it really works. Some people have said it's a crippled, small machine. Rubbish! This does something your machine can't do.

It's sunlight-readable, it uses so little power we can hand crank it, and it's a meshed network. When you set it up, even when it's off it's a little router, it's a little Cisco router type that's inside. So, a lot of the technology that is in here is really very, very sophisticated and the people who worked on it (I'll leave it here for people to play with afterwards) - the people who worked on it really did, quite frankly, an extraordinarily good job.

I'll leave it there for people to play with afterwards. That's the "excuse me" for being too long.

Martin Varsavsky: Thanks, Nicholas. [Applause] I wanted to ask a question that wasn't - I know you probably like giving your reply on here - but I just wanted to shift the debate to something different, which is: "Do you have to be American to be good?" Right. And I know it sounds silly and stupid and everybody will say: "No, you don't have to be." But, wanting to be good seems to be an American vocation.

I mean, here are an American, an American corporation, and an American. Now, I'm not an American, and I just wondered The other day I read an article called "The Army of Altruists" that actually described (I think I read it in Harper's) actually explained that there is no way to show that the Americans joined the military because of money. You do the calculations and there is just no way, it's not true that they don't have another choice. In fact that there seems to be an enormous altruism in joining the army.

There seems to be a lot of altruism in doing things that, like I said, do good and things that do harm. Because, inarguably a lot of harm has come out of initiatives that try to do well. I wouldn't say that Bush intentionally wanted to harm Iraq when he called for the invasion, but the results are there. So, it is dangerous to try to do well and then fail, because you could

But the Americans, for example I was reading about violent death, and I saw that Americans lead the industrialized countries in violent death, homicide. But if you consider suicide violent death it turns out that this evens out because the Europeans are very likely to be violent against them, right, and kill them. Americans seem to want to take action: "I know how to fix your life, I'll kill you."

Europeans say: "I know how to fix my life, I'll kill myself." And, when you take both the violent deaths you find out that the actual rate of violent death is the same in Europe and America.

[Voice off-mike makes comment] [Laughs]

So, all this in of course a humorous way, but I'm trying to say, that none of these American initiatives in my view will succeed if there is no buy-in in the rest of the world. They need the rest of the world to buy into these initiatives.

So, maybe starting with you, Steve, you could tell us what is it that you we saw your New York accent, commercial, and description very, very well and it was really great. But, you know, New York is doing pretty well. What about all the kids in Argentina where I come from? And what about

So tell us what you're doing outside of America. And also, of course, I know Nicholas' project involves only people that actually are from outside, it's an American creation that is being deployed in the rest of the world. But, I think, going to the point, if there is no buy-in there is no development outside. So, let's start with you. What's happening with NFTE outside of America?

Steve Marietta: Well first of all, I think one of the most important ways to do well, so to speak, is to create a business. And I think that teaching a child how to create wealth and how to build assets will eventually over the next 100 years really help us solve a lot of the world's program.

So, we've tried to be global since Note's very beginning. I'm very proud to say that we actually have offices in 17 countries around the world. One of the top programs in the whole world in youth entrepreneurship for low-income children is right here in Germany. Two of our three leaders are here. Ferdinand Schneider, I don't know where you are, but if you'd stand up I'd love to wave to you.

There you are! Hi, Ferdinand! And Christina zu Salm who's a dear friend, and with Stephen Brenninkmeijer is actually on our board here along with the head of Goldman Sachs of Germany. So, we believe in globalization and in getting kids all over the world to trade and try to create businesses.

We have a very large program in Israel. We have a program in Hebron. We have programs in China and India, and El Salvador and South Africa. We are the official youth entrepreneurship in South Africa; it's going to be one of the top programs in the world. We're strong in Ireland and Great Britain, and the Netherlands and Belgium.

I really think that the number one way, I think, to prevent a disaster with weapons of mass destruction is to try to replicate amongst the children of the world democracy and the power of markets to solve problems, so those are my thoughts. Gavin: Thank you. I think the altruism basically that you've described before also is based, you know if you look politically, how in Europe social welfare is a lot better than it ever was in the US.

You see these things converging more and more but I think it has a different history. But, as I said earlier, one of the most important things that we believe is that you work locally with local people. They will tell you what they need. One time in South Africa, in Johannesburg, we came with this ICT center. We thought with training and development we were going to really be great and help out.

Even the NGO was convinced that this was the right thing to do, to train certain people at Diastole. What it turned out to be was a step ahead, and we had to look at creating the school where we were going to teach, looking at some of the crime, looking at some other things. So, we pulled in different people to even create a setting that made sense for ICT to come in.

Another example was, also in South Africa, where we created an I- Village. And that was in the province of Limpopo, 300,000 people. We created access points there, like 23, where people could go and find out what was important to them, about health and government. Then they'd get trained and they would also realize that this could benefit them much more widely in their lives than just getting the basic information. It grew and it got bigger and got better, but it could only be done because there were people there that understood the needs of the community.

We are in 170 and something countries and we act only where we have employees and can then engage locally. Because, it makes no sense to sit in Palo Alto and think: "Here is how we are going to save the world." You're not going to make a dent.

Martin Varsavsky: Nicholas, are you sitting in Boston thinking on how to save the world?

Nicholas Negroponte: First of all, I was in Boston 10 days last year. I carry an EU passport. I did half my education in Europe. My family is 100% European. And, yes, I did study at MIT and stayed there a big piece of my life, but I don't think of myself as a citizen of any country at all. I have no nation and I think nationalism is a disease. It's a disease that has really hurt the world.

[Applause]

I don't wake up in the morning and say: "God, I'm doing well!" I just don't do it that way. But, it is true that in the United States for a variety of reasons the concept of charity and being charitable is much more entrenched than it is in Europe. My mother on her deathbed, I said to her: "Why didn't you give away some of your money?" She didn't have very much but I said: "Why didn't you give away half?"

"Oh, absolutely not! It's for you, it's for the children, and it's for the family!" Well, you have slightly different things that happen in the United States where some people make money very quickly then they learn that giving your children money is really instant tragedy. I mean, that's one of the worst things you can do. So, they decide to give it to other causes, and that's pretty good.

Europeans haven't generally learned that. They think that, ah, the children have to work in the company, and they've got to work in the family, and I'm going to project the family. My father, who was in the shipping business, kind of said: "None of you go in the shipping business." You know, we weren't the Kennedy's, but my older brother committed his entire life to civil service. I went to a university. My younger brothers, we're four brothers, one is a painter, and one is a filmmaker.

Everybody did something different because the family said: "Do what you love." And, most people don't get to do what they love - and that's the big tragedy. I think in the United States you see more charity in general because people who make money realize pretty quickly that that's what their children should do and that's what they should maybe do with they're money.

So then there's the slight tendency to do that.

[Inaudible off mike comments??] OK, then maybe that's the message.

Martin Varsavsky: Let me ask you; let me ask you, I know that it's hard with the mikes because we have to face the signal that we're speaking. Now it's my turn. I had a few questions.

For me, Nicholas, you know I'm a supporter of your project and you know that in Argentina through my foundation we have been great supporters of your project but when I bog about it or I write about it I get a lot of questions. The questions that you get asked in a country like Argentina, and since we can't do this interactive thing I'm going to finish my questions and then I'll switch over to you Nicholas.

So, these are my questions. The first thing people say is, they say: "To really give one laptop per child we need $1.5 billion. Yes, each one is very cheap, but we still have 10 million students, let's say, or something like that. Then, they're probably going to be a little more than $100, so, when we're done, where do we get this $1 billion from?

Shouldn't we start with kids who are maybe 16-year-olds - shouldn't we start at one level and then, if we give to 5% or 10% of the kids every year then eventually we'll get to the money because we just don't have it. The second thing is that people say: "What about everything else we could be doing with that money? What about school lunches and so on?"

So, where do we get this money, what else could we do with this money? And, the third thing that people say is: "How important is this laptop versus say, for example, investing a tremendous amount in providing books, improving libraries, reading? What about the quality of reading that people get out of operating with laptops?"

So these are the three questions, I'd like to see if you can address them for the people here and really a lot of people around the world who love the project but are concerned about these issues.

Nicholas Negroponte: The economics are really very simple. If you look at the $100, which in the beginning is going to be about $150 anyways, if you look at the $150, that's a big amount of money if you look at it as $150. If you amortize it over 5 years which the World Bank and the development banks are going to do, that's $30. $30 per year over five years, we know how to connect every child for $1 a month, unlimited 7/24 connection, so that's added another $12, that's $42. That's the start price and drops to $32 dollars in about 24 months.

Look at that $32 which is the end of 2008 price and what you have to compare it is, in your country they spend $1,700 per year per child in primary education. If you're spending $1,700, my God, $32 is meaningless, meaningless! Argentina is the richest or second richest country we're dealing with. Now, in Rwanda they spend $150 per child. Suddenly, the $32 is a big piece. But, the $32 is going to leverage, in this case, the kids to do something that wasn't doable before.

So, even though the economics as a percentage of what people are spending on education is a bigger percentage, it may have a bigger effect. One common question I get is why aren't we doing it in the United States? We're not doing it in the United States because the average is $8,000-$10,000 per year per child for primary school. When you're spending that kind of money it really doesn't matter, you know. Plus, you don't need the hand-winding; you don't a lot of the things. Do you start with older kids? No. You don't start with them.

Politicians always want to because those are the kids who are going to be first of all in the job market, and second of all perhaps voting for them in a pretty short period of time. To start with 6-year-olds is a very long-term investment. And it's not like building a tunnel or a highway which may take fiver or six years but you see a lot of construction going on; it kind of looks like you're doing something.

Education doesn't have a payoff as quickly. So, the reason you have to start with the very young children is that if you screw up primary education you spend all your time fixing it afterwards. And, most kids don't get to secondary education anyway. I've built five schools in Cambodia, primary schools, in the absolutely remotest parts of that country. The town that I first did it in which is where the first laptops went five years ago, very much an inspiration for the $100 Laptop, the average income is $47 a year in that town. This year I heard in September that twice as many students showed up for first grade.

That's what I call a success! Were they coming from other villages? No. What's happening? The 6-year-olds were telling the other 6- Year-olds: "You know, school is pretty cool. You might want to come." The parents started going to the school, looking at it, "What's happening?" And, suddenly, twice as many kids instead of being in the fields were in school. That sort of thing to me is so compelling, when I see that happening, that I think that the economics is really not the issue. A common, sort of the "everything else" part of your question, it happens a lot.

"Why would you give a kid a laptop when they're starving and they don't have primary medicine and, you know, they have health problems, and they don't have a roof, etc. etc.?" Look, when you're starving all that counts is food. If you're unhealthy all that counts is health. If somebody says: "Why give a child a laptop?" I quickly say: "Substitute for the world laptop for education' and you'll never say that sentence again." And, it's true.

So the question is: "Do you believe that this can be part of and an important piece of education?" If you don't, then don't do this! It isn't for you; it isn't for your country. If you believe it is, then it's not "versus" I mean, nobody sits around and says: "Should we do education or worry about food?" Not both. They're always done in parallel. The books argument, that's the easiest. Brazil, I know the number by heart, its $19 per year per child in primary and secondary school, that's almost $20 which is $100, amortized over five years.

The kid gets two books, maybe three books. Maybe there's a library and so on. But, you can just justify this on books, because only rich kids have the extra books like atlases and reference books, let alone all of the other pieces of literature that you'd want to have access to. If you're connected by Google or whatever to the internet you've basically got all books, most books. And the amount of people, the amount of goodwill... Paolo Coelho sent me a piece of e-mail two days ago and said: "I'm donating all my books." I thought, well, I hadn't even thought about that but if people want to donate their books and so on, we'll take their books.

So, I think we have a much better chance of providing them books in which the economic of books I call that the Trojan horse. We go to say Mr. Head of State or Mrs. Head of State. Think of interest as a book. Just books, just textbooks. In most states (the United States is not one of them), most states control the textbooks, use the textbook channel. The Federal channel in Brazil does the textbooks. You may think of that as a liability but we use it as a feature, distribute through that channel, and it's a Trojan horse approach.

It appears gently as a textbook and then at night the kids come out and use it as a laptop. That's the Trojan horse approach with sort of a book story as we've thought about it. So, books are an easy one, and the economics are not hard. These are not big numbers. They're big numbers if you take the population the Minister of Education in China has 220 million kids in primary and secondary schools. If you multiply 220 million times $100, that's a lot of money!

But, you look at what they're spending per child already, and take a small percentage of it; it's not a hard story.

Martin Varsavsky: Not in China also, because they're already starting with the one child, so now they get the one laptop, anode Now, do we have any questions here? We have a little time left for questions. Yes, there please just shout it.

[Inaudible from audience] So it's about the content of the laptop. Does the laptop come with any content, Nicholas?

Nicholas Negroponte: The laptop is, in e-book mode, a Wiki. The machine has no DRM in it, and this is very purposeful. It's a wiki medium and if you want to put content on it, kisses your content goodbye, because this becomes public. And that's why it's open source. It's all very, it's really geared on the Wikipedia model. That doesn't mean there isn't content.

You'll see some announcements this week where big publishers are putting content out there, but it's they're tiptoeing into open source and open content. So, we turn out to be a venue for a publisher to experiment with truly open source and no DRM. [Applause]

Martin Varsavsky: In Europe we don't like DRM. Now, we only have like 50 seconds left, and I think we have to abide by the time, so I just wanted to thank everyone for doing good, I hope you keep doing that, and I hope everybody else here donates a little..

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