English Audio Request

These laptops, the first of 100,000 that the government intends should be given to every Rwandan child between the ages of nine and 12, represent a kind of revolution. One that envisages not only the transformation of an impoverished agrarian society into one of the most advanced in Africa, but also sees technology as a tool that will help exorcise the country's lingering ghosts. The genocide that took place in this country in 1994 deprived many of these children of uncles, aunts, grandparents. During 100 days of killing, 800,000 minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in service of so-called "Hutu Power".
I examine the computer closely the next day. It is being turned over in the large hands of David Cavallo in a coffee shop in a modern mall in Kigali. Cavallo is project director and "learning architect" for One Laptop Per Child; the organisation that developed and supplies the computers. He is an enthusiastic and youthful 58, with a tangled mop of salt-and-pepper hair, a boxer's nose and grizzled beard.
Rwanda is not the first country to have been supplied with the XO machines by One Laptop Per Child (1.4 million have been delivered to children in 35 countries including Haiti, Afghanistan, Brazil and Uruguay), but it does present one of the most challenging projects that the organisation has yet undertaken. For Cavallo, it is also one of the most exciting.
The organisation's mission statement – to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children via a "rugged low-cost, low-power laptop" – might have had Rwanda specifically in mind. Its shortages of electricity and lower internet connectivity are driving One Laptop Per Child to develop ever cheaper and tougher machines with ever lower power consumption. The next generation of computers will be usable even where there is no mains power at all. And at the heart of their programme is the idea of "joyful, playful and innovatory" learning.