One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has said that it would send about 100 teams of undergraduate and graduate students from universities around the world to African countries to distribute $100 XO laptops among the school children. Initiated by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC is a non-profit organization which aims to provide school children of third world countries with $100 laptops. OLPC does not generally sell its XO laptops commercially in the laptop market, and it mainly deals with governments in providing children with its XO laptops for free. However, OLPC has not been able to bring down the laptop price up to $100 due to global economic slowdown and price in raw materials.

Now, OLPC is going to launch this Summer program in which university students would help the organization in providing the laptops to the students in various African nations. Each of the student teams will be given 100 XO laptops, related hardware, and up to $10,000 of operating costs. They would also work alongside local community with a view to introducing a laptop assisted primary education in the schools.

This is really a great initiative. In this way, the University students will gain some invaluable real life experience which they would be able to use in their future career. Moreover, in this way, OLPC would also be able to cut its cost, by not hiring highly-skilled technical people.

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