Laptops Come to Schools in the Andes

BusinessWeek writer Geri Smith reports from Luquia, a tiny village in Peru which just took stock of some of the first XO computers

by Geri Smith

The aging station wagon crept slowly up a one-lane dirt road that zigzagged up a steep mountain in the Peruvian Andes. At the sharpest hairpin curves, with clusters of crosses marking the spots where cars or buses had plummeted in the past, the driver leaned on the horn to alert oncoming traffic and the occasional cow or donkey to our presence. It took nearly two hours to drive up that one mountainside to reach the tiny, isolated village of Luquia, where the arrival two weeks earlier of 73 child-size laptop computers had generated more excitement than the several hundred townspeople had ever witnessed.

President Alan García had helicoptered in, handed over computers in a formal ceremony, and then flown away again, leaving the village's three primary-school teachers to figure out how to put the 21st-century technology to use in a place where people still hand-plow fields of potatoes, just as their Inca ancestors did five centuries earlier.

In Peru, around half the population lives below the poverty line. In thousands of small rural hamlets, high in the Andes or deep in the Amazon region, people live in extreme poverty, earning less than a dollar a day. There are no stores, and little entertainment; only a few families own something as simple as an AM radio. There is electricity, but there are frequent blackouts. Luquia has a high school, but if students want to become anything other than subsistence farmers or laborers in a nearby gold mine, they need to learn more skills.

Bottom of the Educational Heap

Throughout Latin America, governments are under pressure to improve their educational systems so that children will be able to compete in the global economy. Few have had much success: Standardized tests carried out among 15-year-olds in 47 countries around the world show students in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru at the bottom of the heap in reading comprehension and math. Peru is the worst, with 54% of the teens tested in 2003 unable to understand basic texts or perform simple calculations.

José Antonio Chang, a former university administrator who became Education Minister in mid-2006, knew radical steps were needed after years of neglect and underspending.

Chang heard Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, speak at a conference, and he thought the laptop program dovetailed perfectly with Peru's plans to shake up its educational system. "We told Negroponte, if there's any country in the world that is using the pedagogy you are talking about, it's Peru," says Oscar Becerra, a former IBM executive who is director of educational technology for the ministry. "Why don't we try working together?"

Last year, Negroponte sent 100 laptops to Peru for testing. Half were delivered to Arahuay, a four-hour drive outside of the country's capital, Lima. "Within two or three days, we already noticed changes at the primary school—not even the most optimistic of us had thought that was possible," Becerra says.

"Stupendous" Learning Tools

A boy who had repeated first grade twice intuitively understood how the laptop worked and became the go-to problem-solver for students and teachers alike. Enrollment at the school increased, as word spread that the computers had arrived. Within months, students' reading and math skills sharpened.

"The kids' expectations for their future have changed," says Becerra. "It gives them hope that education might help them change their lives, whereas before they were condemned to continue doing what their parents did for a living."