尼葛洛庞帝将OLPC带到哥伦比亚(文本).docxVIP

尼葛洛庞帝将OLPC带到哥伦比亚it’s amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, “what is your most precious natural resource?” they will not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you. We are traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police. And we are dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off of the rest of the world for the past 40 years. The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then becamea drug movement.There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don’t have electricity at home or at school. And in some countries—let me pick Afghanistan—75 percent of the little girls don’t go to school. And Idon’t mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade—they don’t go.So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it has gone from an idea to a real laptop. We have half of million laptops today in the hands of children, we have about quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops. That’s smaller than I predicted—I predicted 3 to 10 million—but is still a very large number. In Columbia, we have about 3000 laptops, it’s the minister of defense with whom we are working, not the minister of education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years’ worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations, lived. And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. They’ve leapfrogged. The change is absolutely m