This selected group of organizations has shown their commitment and leadership in closing the digital divide in emerging countries, focusing on providing access to life-altering technology and information to children across the globe.

is still too expensive.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

I said, ‘That’s too bad, because I need 100 million a year.’ They said, ‘Well, maybe we can change our strategic plan.’ That’s the reason you need scale.

It bothers me when people spoil the market.

I do tell governments we’re selling you a Trojan horse,

Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education,

We have been asked directly about this, … Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn’t have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They’re going to adopt e-books much faster...

When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you’re doing something right.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

This is not teaching as we know it; only part of our learning comes from teaching. Much of it comes from curiosity. These are tools that can help cultivate that learning process.

We really believe we can really make literally hundreds of millions of these machines around the world,

The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills,

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way – and I mean that in the most generous...

Children are the greatest natural resource of any country, and educating these children is at the root of solving our largest and most complex problems. Yet the best education may not come from sitting in...

We have to make machines understand what they’re doing, or they won’t be able to come back and say, ‘Why did you do that?’

unbelievably silly, because terrorists and drug dealers aren’t waiting for FedEx to deliver a disk to Libya or Colombia.

A colleague of mine said it made him think twice about kissing his wife goodbye in the morning,

I am always asked in my travels through the developing world: ‘If this is such a good idea, why isn’t America doing it?’ … Well, now they are.

Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they… can never be without some element of education.

I have come to a conclusion that every new release of software is distinctly worse than the other. Why? It’s because the fat lady can’t sing. There’s a natural tendency to add stuff. Suddenly it...

Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.

We will see a billion users of the Internet before the end of the year 2000,

Kids will drive this, … There’s no 16-year-old that’s not digital. ? When someone’s kids go to college, parents sign up on America Online to send E-mail to their kids.

I’ve told the governments that our price will float and go down over time,

Linux is its own worst enemy: it’s splintered, it has different distributions, it’s too complex to run for most people.

The plan is for the $100 laptop to do almost everything. What it will not do is store a massive amount of data.

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...

the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.

The initial plan is to start with countries that are big and very different to each other,

You look at countries like Italy and Spain, which both have low (Internet user) numbers, but Italy could actually be more wired than France,

My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.

I think $1 trillion a year by 2000 is modest,

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most...

This is the right move at the right time,

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

The idea is that it fulfils many roles. It is the whole theory that learning is seamless,

There are 200,000 paid subscribers in Mexico,

Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.

Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, … We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is...

It’s hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you’re going to depend on the community to make software for it.

Most people don’t realize that common sense is the real thing computers are missing,

Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

In emerging nations, the issue isn’t connectivity,

Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away.

Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient’s point of view, that’s zero.

Studies have shown that kids take up computers much more easily in the comfort of warm, well-lit rich country living rooms, but also in the slums and remote areas all around the developing world.

We’ve been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the...

The idea is to have it play many roles so that the child takes it home, uses it for play, study. The whole theory is that learning is seamless, it’s not something you just do...