I'd rather give someone food. Or maybe books and study materials for him and several of his classmates. OLPC always struck me as a terribly inefficient use of money and effort.

1) Prioritizing extreme poverty (i.e. people who need food) is one possible strategy. However, you could make the argument that education-oriented gifts have the ability to lift a country with less dire poverty into self-sufficiency. Depending on where we are talking about, there is often the case that there is plenty of food, but it's not reaching the people for political reasons. In those places, it doesn't really matter what you send-- it's going to get taken. It might be more productive in the short/medium term to target places with at least minimal infrastructure, and there food isn't a problem. Sending food to Darfur right now, for example, isn't terribly productive.

2) The laptop is infinitely cheaper and more efficient than books. Each one could be preloaded with a full K-12 syllabus in the native language-- there's plenty of public domain work out there.

3) There's a remarkable link between rising education and real, causative problems that keep people poor for generations:

- Educated people choose to have fewer children.
- Educated people are more receptive to extending rights to women, and racial/social/religious minorities.
- Educated people are more resistant to radical fundamentalism.

If you're supplying the laptops, you have the opportunity to make sure the texts do objective comparisons of different political systems, philosophies, etc., and cover modern science and history from a global perspective. You want people to say "Huh. There are plenty of places that don't live under quasi-feudalism or authoritarian theocracies, and their standard of living is quite good. Maybe we should try that.", along with more basic things like "Oh. AIDS isn't a curse or a punishment. It's a virus. That's why they're always trying to hand out condoms."

Personally, I think if you solve the social issues, the food takes care of itself in a generation's time.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com