One Laptop Per Child News

There is cute slideshow of children using the OLPC laptop in a Nigerian primary school here, along with a BBC news item and a bunch of features about the laptop and its introduction.

I want one. Anyone interested in donating an XO to Development Entrepreneur News go here and order. For only $399 plus shipping you will make me happy, and also donate an XO to a school in the developing world. Wouldn't that be nice?

The One Laptop Per Child project hasn't been as successful so far as originally projected, partly because of a scramble by commercial computer makers to get similar machines into the market (as noted in this recent WSJ article). In particular Intel has created its own Classmate computer for the developing world (the XO uses AMD chips) and is promoting it aggressively. As one Nigerian consultant quoted in the WSJ piece said, "It's a no-brainer you go with Microsoft." (A version of Windows runs on the Classmate.)

Company founder Nicholas Negroponte professes to be philosophic about it: "From my point of view, if the world were to have 30 million" laptops made by competitors "in the hands of children at the end of next year, that to me would be a great success," he said in a recent interview. "My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business."

Philippine Entreprener Does Well While Doing Good

Salay Handmade Paper Industry Inc.

Mrs. Loreta Capistrano-Rafisura, President of Salay Handmade Paper, has used the principals of fair trade to provide employment to hundreds of people in the town of Salay, Misamis Oriental.

This item tells the 20-year history of this cooperative enterprise. Started with 6,000 Philippine pesos, it now employs 250 and its founder has become a leading spokeswoman for fair-trade entrepreneurial ventures.

Salay Handmade Paper is a member of IFAT, and credits its success to its links to developed-country distributors of fair-trade products. Although their initial production was marketed locally, in 2006, almost 50 percent of SHAPII’s market is in Europe, 30 percent in North America, 8 percent in Japan and 6 percent in other countries.

Free On-Line Textbooks for Developing World

Professors to distribute wiki textbooks free

This story describes the "Global Text Project" (details here).

This is a voluntary/philanthropic project so far, but the article reveals how slowly it is progressing. Could there be a venture opportunity here? The professors' approach is very different from a true entrepreneurial approach.

With the wiki editing feature, the texts could be written by authors in the developing world, at minimal cost, if top editors could be enlisted. Could it be monetized to cover the cost of those editors and writers, in stead of relying on donations and potential corporate logo placement?

Social VC Event, Palo Alto

Doing Well While Doing Good: Can Venture Capital Impact Social Good?

This is the title of a meeting being held in Palo Alto, California, on 29 November.

More information is available here.

Students from UNC B-School Collaborate to Commercialize Rural Water Technologies

Faculty and students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are setting out to discover whether applying business principles to public health problems can result in solutions that will save lives in developing countries with limited access to safe drinking water, according to this UNC press release.

"We know that biosand and ceramic filters and other household water treatment technologies make an enormous difference in the health of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water," Professor Mark Sobsey said. "We have the technologies, but now it’s a matter of finding ways to get these technologies into communities and households, and have people adopt and use them effectively and sustainably. This project has the potential to save many millions of lives."

Read more in the press release and in this article from the Daily Tar Heel.

WB Head Reassures Developing Countries

In an attempt to calm the fears of developing countries that climate policy could marginalise traditional development policy, World Bank president Robert Zoellick has called for the integration of both, he told Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an interview.

See Forbes.com article.

Seattle Entrepreneur Deploys Cellphones Against Poverty

Like so many others who found their fortune with Microsoft, Peter Bladin left the company and embarked on a second career to try to make the world a better place. Few people understand how information enriches the world better than Seattle's technology pioneers. Bladin, a Swedish native who spent 10 years at Microsoft, founded the Grameen Technology Center in 2001 and oversees its work developing mobile phones, software and other technology to support efforts to eliminate poverty.

Read article at The Seattle Times.

Electronic Business Registries Stimulate Entrepreneurship

In a study of global entrepreneurship, Raffi Amit and Mauro Guillen, both Wharton management professors, have found that a simple, if smart, bureaucratic initiative mattered critically in determining a country's level of entrepreneurship. Specifically, countries that created electronic business registries saw far higher levels of new business formation than those with traditional paper ones. Even the announcement that a country planned to establish an online log led to a jump in business registrations.

See article at knowledge@wharton.

Entrepreneurship development centre launched

Entrepreneurship was the way to eradicate poverty and hunger from the country, said Shri Pravir Kumar, Joint Secretary of Ministry of MSME. Shri K.R. Arya, Executive Director of National Institute for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development stated that the scheme of entrepreneurship development centre is aimed at promotion of entrepreneurship and skill development through establishment of a large network of entrepreneurship development centers in public private partnership. More in article from Organizer.