One Laptop Per Child Launches OLPCorps

One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, is launching an internship program in which up to 100 teams of university students from around the world will distribute thousands of XO laptops to children in Africa this summer. Partnering with schools and non-governmental organizations in Africa, undergraduate and graduate students from around the world will assist in providing educational opportunities to children in the world’s poorest countries.

One Laptop per Child will provide each student team with 100 XO laptops, related hardware, and up to $10,000 for operating costs. The teams will attend an orientation workshop in Kigali, Rwanda from June 8-17. Afterwards, they will spend nine weeks in an African nation, working directly with local community partners to integrate the XO laptop into primary education.

OLPC Founder and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said that the new program “represents a determined effort by One Laptop per Child to engage university students worldwide in bringing an education revolution to children living in some of the most remote places on Earth. By empowering students from a multitude of countries and cultures to act as agents of change, the belief that all children have a right to quality education – regardless of where they happen to live — will spread across the globe.”

To date, One Laptop per Child has put over 500,000 XO laptops into the hands of children all across the world.

About One Laptop per Child

One Laptop per Child (OLPC at http://www.laptop.org) is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are inexpensive enough to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. XO laptops are rugged, solar-powered, and connect to other XO’s, and the Internet.

Contacts

One Laptop per Child
Jackie Lustig, 781-487-4664
or
Kyle Austin, 781-487-4603
press {at} racepointgroup(.)com