<h3>Ethiopia leads the way with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)</h3>
Ethiopia is set to become the first country in Africa to adopt the OLPC initiative. To celebrate the launch, the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp) is bringing together His Excellency, State Minister for Education Ato Wondossen Kiflu and the Italian Ambassador, His Excellency, Ambassador Raffaele de Lutio. The Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has committed his government to collaborating with the OLPC initiative, providing 50,000 laptops to Ethiopia.
ecbp has brought the One Laptop Per Child (a non-profit initiative) to Ethiopia in order to give children new opportunities for their education. ecbp, which introduced the OLPC laptops in Addis Ababa, will present the results of this approach at the Atse Naod Primary and Secondary School, Addis Ababa, on the 22nd of August, 2007.
ecbp has been primarily responsible for bringing this initiative to Ethiopia, and has ensured that Ethiopia may become the first country in Africa to launch this historic initiative which has been written about in publications all over the world including the Economist, the New York Times, the Guardian and hundreds of other media outlets worldwide .
For this special occasion, Nicholas Negroponte, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founder of the Cambridge-based NGO One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), will introduce the initiative, which he explains is “an education project, not a laptop project,” and what he hopes it will achieve in Ethiopia.
These laptops, at a cost of approximately $170.00 will be rolled out in various regions by ecbp, making them accessible to children around the whole country.
ecbp invites you to come to this interactive presentation of OLPC where the invited personalities and journalists will join the children through the test of the first laptops in Ethiopia, with an opportunity of asking directly the founder of this worldwide movement to educate children with the use of technology. Members of the public and press will witness first hand this revolutionary children’s machine, and learn why professor Negroponte refers to this projects as “an education project, not a laptop project…”