**WORKING DRAFT—NOT FOR CITATON**
ICT4D, Gender Divides, and Education: The Case of OLPC in Ghana1
H. Leslie Steeves
University of Oregon
October 24, 2014
In this digital era, there has been increased emphasis on new ICTs to modernize
the South. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nicholas Negroponte’s One
Laptop per Child (OLPC) –or ‘$100 laptop’—project aims to make low cost computers
accessible to the “world’s poorest children.” Publicity uses rhetoric of equipping these
children to “leapfrog” into the information age and empower them with education via the
‘green’ XO laptop. Images of children using their XOs, presumably browsing the
internet, populate the OLPC web site and affiliated publicity, even at one point a Crocker
fruit snacks campaign aimed at children in the U.S., claiming that buying fruit snacks
would bring laptops to poor children in Africa.
The project raises many kinds of questions at both macro and micro levels. This
study, which began in 2009, originally was entirely exploratory and aimed simply to
investigate how one pilot deployment of laptops in Ghana was received by participants at
the grassroots, what benefits they experienced, and what challenges they faced. In the
I thank Senyo Ofori-Parku, John Yarney, and Janet Kwami, who assisted with the
fieldwork. I am also grateful to: the teachers and children at the Kanda Cluster of
Schools, particularly Kanda 5; the teachers and children at Bonsaaso Primary; and
numerous staff at the Ghana Ministry of Education, Accra, and the Millennium
Villages Project of Amansie West District in Ashanti Region, Ghana. This manuscript
is a preliminary work-in-progress and not for citation. Note that some of the
material in this draft has been drawn from Steeves & Kwami (2012) and Melkote &
Steeves (in press). That material will be revised and/or properly cited in future
versions.
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process a clear gender theme emerged; hence, this paper focuses primarily on exposing
and understanding how an existing digital gender divide can even be exacerbated by a
project that aims to help. A recent ITU and UNESCO report (ITU, 2013b) shows that the
internet gender gap is growing and calls for action. Therefore it is important to see what
lessons we can learn about unintended consequences of projects that aim to empower
recipients of technologies and address digital divides but instead widen them.
The story of OLPC in Ghana and elsewhere needs to be contextualized within
several areas of dialogue and scholarship. These include: the long history of critiques of
modernization, globalization and technological determinism, including feminist critiques;
dialogues within the past 15 or so years on the millennium development goals and on
digital divides, which led to the World Summit on Information Society and post WSIS
initiatives. Additionally in Ghana and globally there has been much discussion of ICTs,
gender and other intersections, though this has not translated much into policy or
practice. Next, I review this background, then discuss the story of the OLPC in Ghana
and ways in which the project neglected the gendered contexts into which these ICTs
were inserted.
BACKGROUND
ICTs: Definition and Historical Context
In the past decades it became clear that a major subfield of policy and practice—
information and communication technologies for development or ‘ICT4D’—had emerged
within development studies. ICT4D became especially salient around the turn of the
century as the accelerated diffusion of digital technologies greatly increased the
possibilities for global information sharing and accelerated development. The meaning of
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ICT4D is contested, however; it varies depending on what both ICTs and development
are presumed to comprise. Here I accept Gillian Marcelle’s often-cited definition of
ICTs, as comprising old or ‘legacy’ media, as well as newer digital technologies:
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) comprise a
complex and heterogeneous set of goods, applications and services
used to produce, distribute, process and transform information.
They include the outputs of industries as diverse as
telecommunications, television and radio broadcasting, computer
hardware and software, computer services and electronic media
(e.g., the Internet, electronic mail, electronic commerce and
computer games) (Marcelle, 2000, p. 5).
This definition acknowledges that ICTs are evolutionary, and did not appear suddenly in
the latter half of the 20th century. Hence, there is no bright line between old and new
ICTs; they overlap, evolve rapidly (the meaning of ‘new’ is ever-changing), co-exist, and
an older form may be more appropriate than a newer form in a particular context. In
addition, ICTs include applications and services, and not just hardware and gadgets.
ICTs may also be described as "electronic means of capturing, processing, storing,
and communicating information" (Heeks, 1999). Digital or ‘new’ ICTs store the
information as ones and zeros and transmit the data through telecommunication networks.
The 'older' technologies such as the radio and television used to be entirely analog systems
in which information was held as electric signals and transmitted through electromagnetic
waves. Digital ICTs include mobile phones, tablet and laptop computers, communication
satellites, and the internet. There has been a significant proliferation of each of these
technologies in developing countries over the past two decades. The Satellite Instructional
Television Experiment (SITE) in India, the Palapa Experiment in Indonesia, and
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experiments with satellite-based rural telephony in Peru are some of the earlier examples of
‘new’ ICTs in the 1970s and 1980s.
Digital ICTs connect people and institutions globally in a web of real-time
interactions and transactions. Data from the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU) show the dramatic increase of Internet users, mobile phone subscriptions, mobile
broadband connections, and bandwidth capacity that is crucial for high speed Internet
(ITU, 2011, 2013a, 2013b). It is no surprise, therefore, that there is so much support for
the central role of ICTs and their networks in the processes of connectivity that symbolize
contemporary globalization (Lule, 2012). Information technology has had a fundamental
place and role in all facets of the process of globalization, making connectivity possible
in all sectors of contemporary societies. For example, one can effortlessly buy and sell
stocks held in a country far away; the banking industry can monitor and execute global
transactions; transnational corporations can make decisions and act from a distance;
people can easily send money to family members via transfers using mobile phones;
families can stay in touch through services such as Skype; and, the Arab Spring protests
were facilitated greatly by the use of Twitter and other social media.
Discourse around ICTs is not new and may be traced to Daniel Lerner’s (1958)
modernist belief in the power of technologies, including media technologies, to quickly
Westernize traditional societies. Within the mainstream of ICT4D policy and discourse,
development is a re-articulation of modernization achieved through economic growth
under globalization. Most references to ICT4D are in the context of developing countries
using ICTs to leapfrog the different stages of development to catch up to advancements in
the North. Castells (1999) supports this view by stating that “the availability and use of
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information and communication technologies are a pre-requisite for economic and social
development in our world. They are the functional equivalent of electricity in the
industrial era" (p.3). Developing countries cannot afford to be behind in the digital age
anymore than they could function without electrification in past decades. ICT4D
therefore generally refers to the possibilities created through access and use of ICTs for
modernization. The United Nations, through its various institutions, actively promotes
ICT4D as a tool for economic and social development around the world, particularly in
developing countries.
The failures of most technology-intensive projects, their one-way top down
assumptions and strategies, their negative side-effects, their many biases, including
gender biases, have resulted in a plethora of overlapping critiques, including feminist
critiques, political economy critiques, and postcolonial critiques. These critiques most
significantly observe that projects generally: have an underlying political or economic
motive; that they are imposed from above by powerful actors rather than originating from
the needs and voices of recipients; that they often fail because they do not account for
context or listen to recipients; and that their benefits are usually uneven, with some
groups left out or even harmed in the process (see, e.g., Granqvist, 2005; Melkote &
Steeves, in press). Next ICT projects in particular are placed in historic context.
ICTs, MDGs, and WSIS
There has been much support for ICTs in development from state governments,
international organizations and technology enthusiasts. The purpose of ICT4D policies and
projects has been to address the so-called digital divide between have and have-not
countries, those networked in the digital age and those with less network penetration.
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The rhetoric of ICT4D emerged from WSIS, which was framed in part as a means of
addressing the Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Summit in NYC
discussed and debated the role of the United Nations in the new century and ways to
address continuing global inequities related to extreme poverty, despite four decades of
development aid. The 192 member states agreed on eight interrelated Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) to achieve by 2015, specifically: eradicate extreme hunger
and poverty; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower
women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and
other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for
development.
The need for technological support to achieve the MDGs helped catalyze
subsequent events, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s 2001 creation of a
United Nations ICT Task Force to analyze multiple ICT4D topics, such as internet
governance and implications of ICTs for the MDGs. Even earlier, beginning in 1998, the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) had been proposing a major summit on
the information society within the UN system, ever since the US-based corporation
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was created and was
perceived as steadily seeking control over the internet’s globally shared resources (Klein,
2004, p. 9). As a result of the above and other initiatives, UN General Assembly
Resolution 56/183 (21 December, 2001) directed the international community to hold a
WSIS in two phases: in Geneva (Switzerland) in December 2003 and in Tunis (Tunisia)
in November 2005. During the period leading up to WSIS Geneva, three major
preparatory meetings and numerous regional meeting were held globally to gather input
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and prepare for documents to be adopted at WSIS 2003 (Klein, 2004). Additionally, UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2002 challenged Silicon Valley to invent appropriate
and affordable technologies for rural areas in the developing world, inventions that would
then help ground and extend WSIS, as well as the MDGs. Numerous countries created
policies for universal access during this timeframe, policies that also aimed to support the
eight MDGs, presuming that ICT4D benchmarks could align with MDGs and help
support them.
In general, within the UN system, the UNDP played a major role in supporting
WSIS outcomes via numerous projects aimed bring ICTs to economically disadvantaged
regions and groups. Most agree that WSIS succeeded in framing and organizing global
public discourse around ICTs and the digital divide. WSIS successfully challenged
ICANN’s claim on Internet governance, facilitated broad participation, and provided
legitimacy to alternative voices. Additionally, WSIS also advanced global discourse on
free and open-source software (FOSS), as an alternative to monopolies such as Microsoft,
and legitimized the allocation of global resources to address the digital divide (Klein,
2004).
A major goal of WSIS and resulting ICT4D policies has been to address the socalled digital divide between the information rich and information poor, usually
presumed to be between the global North and South, through access to new ICTs. The
digital divide has proven to be a slippery concept, as there are different interpretations,
and the digital landscape is in constant flux. Numerous scholars have critiqued the
concept as overly simplistic, as global access to different ICTs is multifaceted and
layered. Issues of access cannot be separated from larger economic, social, political and
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cultural constraints. Plus there is not one big divide, but many shades of marginality.
The term fails to conceptualize intersectionality, the fact that there are multiple
intersecting divides that emerge in the deployment and adoption of ICTs and that are
based on social location, including by gender, economic class, ethnicity, age, religion and
urban versus rural location. These divisions may have a powerful role in affecting
access, as digital inequities are a reflection of old and entwined socio-economic
inequalities. Many have observed that inserting ICTs does not automatically solve these
problems, and may even exacerbate them. ICT strategy involving mere encounters
between machines and humans can even widen gaps and decrease access for those who
cannot overcome certain problems, for instance, of access to transportation, cash, time, or
barriers of language and literacy (e.g., ITU, 2013; Steeves & Kwami, 2012; Gajjala,
2013). Further, a lack of recognition of the gendered nature of ICTs is largely due to how
ICTs have been predominantly conceptualized. ICTs tend to be discussed by government
and most other large institutions as more of a technical phenomenon than a social one.
However, many feminist scholars point out that ICTs in fact are socially constructed, like
all technologies, and therefore require the unveiling of the gendered discourse
surrounding ICTs, often shrouded in patriarchy (Hafkin, 2002a, 2002b; Huyer, 2006;
Rathgeber, 2000; Rosser, 2005; Stamp, 1989).
Africa is often described as an untapped market for IT products such as computers
and other digital technologies, and African governments have become actively involved
in the quest for digital technologies that will enable them to participate in the information
society, in keeping with their ICT4D policies. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, including
Ghana, the wide availability of mobile phones and competition among companies has
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made it possible for most ordinary Africans to own or share cell phones. Thousands of
Ghanaian women have found employment by selling phone calls or phone units at
makeshift kiosks. Also in Ghana rural women yam farmers now use texting to find out
market prices before traveling long distances over bad roads to sell yams, doubling their
incomes, which in turn impacts their entire families. In general, though, the benefits of
ICTs in Ghana have been uneven, as I discuss below.
Ghana and ICT4AD
In Ghana the process of formulating a policy to guide the implementation and use
of ICTs was launched in 2001 in response to WSIS as well as the Millennium
Development Goals. The policy was completed in 2003 and passed into law in 2004. The
overall vision is to improve the quality of life for Ghanaians through the use of ICTs as
the main engines for accelerated socio-economic growth. The policy outlines strategies
for integrating ICTs in different sectors including agriculture, education, health,
commerce and governance.
Early calls for the integration of gender into Ghana’s national ICT policy were
pushed by NGOs, gender activists and feminist scholars led by the NGO Abantu for
Development. Abantu organized a conference that resulted in a gender sensitive
framework intended to guide national policy making (p. 46). The framework outlined key
issues that need to be addressed, premised on the fact that ICT policy efforts were
generally technocentric and failed to consider gender and other social concerns that
exacerbated inequities and digital disparities among various segments of the population.
Similar problems had been identified by global activist organizations such as Association
for Progressive Communication (APC), which does include issues relating to gender and
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ICTs in its agenda (APC, 2002, 2011a, 2011b). As a result of the efforts of Abantu
locally and organizations like APC globally, there were attempts in Ghana’s ICT policies
to address gender issues. Ghana’s planning committee did seek the engagement of
women’s views and even held a public forum with representatives from women’s
organizations. As a result of all this, Ghana’s ICT4AD policy makes mention of using
ICTs to address issues of gender equality; however, the exact strategy on ICTs and
gender is not clearly articulated.
The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, formerly the Ministry of
Women’s and Children’s Affairs,2 has the mandate to promote gender equity and gender
mainstreaming policies and is responsible for implementing the so-called national
strategy on ICTs and gender as part of the overall national ICT policy.
ICT strategies outlined for achieving these gender specific objectives include:

Ensuring that girls and women exploit their innovative capacity to create, design
and use ICT products by ensuring that the implementation of the ICT policy
addresses these gender issues.

Ensuring that women have access to ICT for the purposes of decision making,
business and sustainable learning through the provision of computers in its
proposed women centers for women to access. (MOWAC ICT Policy, p. 4)
These objectives and strategies are vulnerable to criticism, as they do not specify
how they can be achieved and they also treat women and girls as one aggregate category
without considering widely varying social locations and constraints.
2
The Ministry was renamed in February, 2013.
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ICTs also tend to be grouped as one, even though they present different realities
for people in different contexts based on their social location (Slater and Kwami, 2005;
Kwami, 2010). ICTs, even new ones, cannot be bundled together, as there may be great
differences in access—for instance, to mobile phones versus television versus the internet
(Kwami, 2010; Kwami, Wolf-Montiero, & Steeves, 2011). Ethnographic studies in
Ghana reveal that while internet use is widespread in urban areas, it is predominantly
used to chat with or email foreigners, with relatives in the North, and for information
gathering (Slater & Kwami, 2005; Burrell, 2008; Burrell, 2014). Although the internet is
increasingly becoming an important educational and communication tool for segments of
Ghana’s population, among males within poor and marginalized groups the internet is
commonly used for entertainment and/or quick material gain, as in the case of internet
fraud, referred to as “sakawa” (see Burrell, 2008, 2014). Mobile phones on the other
hand, are central to everyday practices of communicating with existing and embedded
social networks, including complex family, business or social connections that constitute
both resources and obligations. Thus, mobile phones, more than the internet, allow
Ghanaians to maintain traditional social networks, especially between urban and rural
areas relations. With convergence of technologies, radio is increasingly available via the
mobile phone as well.
Hence the mobile phone presently offers more potential than the
internet as a development tool for many communities in Ghana, as the internet is largely
out of reach due to limitations of money or literacy or gendered activities in which girls
and women do not participate. I assume here that any ICT-led intervention has to work
in tandem with the dominant local framing of the technology and everyday situated
contexts, which include the consideration of gender.
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In sum, the reality is that in Ghana, as in many parts of the global South, there has
been a clear gendered construction of ICTs that privilege males in terms of ICT access,
use and decision-making. In general, men and boys have more access to ICTs due to
greater resources, training, and leisure time; and men are at the helm of ICT
policymaking and institutions. Though a few women have to actively engage as heads of
ICT organizations, they remain the exception. Women’s engagement tends to be at the
lower stratum either as users or as vendors in the informal sector staffing phone unit
kiosks and selling other mobile and internet services, whereas men own and control
Ghana’s five cell phone companies. In spite of their miniscule participation at the level of
policymaking, Ghanaian women’s informal sector roles are central to the
telecommunication economy. However, their vital roles as distributors of the
telecommunication services often go unacknowledged despite the fact that their services
constitute a substantial part of the revenues for the network providers.
Research illustrates the gendered nature of ICTs access and use in everyday
practices that require policy attention and sensitivity to differential impacts and needs.
Janet Kwami’s (2010) multi-site study of community information centers (CICs) found
that fewer females use CICs due to financial and time constraints. Kwami’s survey found
that males went to the CICs more often than females with 40 percent of male respondents
saying that they used the CIC every day compared to three percent of females. In a study
of six internet cafes in diverse neighborhoods in Accra, Fair, et al. (2009) confirmed the
internet café as a gendered space where young men in their late teens, 20s, and early 30s
spent considerably more time than women; and Burrell (2008, 2014) further documented
this reality. Similarly, Kwapong’s (2007) survey of the three regions in Ghana (Upper
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East, Ashanti, and Greater Accra) found that differences in the socio-economic status of
rural female households’ influenced their choice of information delivery technology and
their willingness to pay for a selected technology.
In the Ghanaian context differences in gender roles are linked to the power
differential between males and females with regards to males’ greater control of
resources. Kwami (2010) found that males were more likely to make big purchases such
as mobile phones, sign up for training, buy more mobile units or spend money at Internet
cafés without having to justify it to anyone, thus, gaining access more easily to digital
technologies than females. In Ghana, as in many countries in the global south, there
seems to be a strong correlation between an individual’s work environment and access to
digital resources. While such access may seem gender neutral at face value, traditional
gender roles, institutional structures and economic realities force disproportionate
numbers of females into the informal sector where opportunities for access are limited.
Additionally, narratives from women respondents reveal gender specific needs and issues
pertaining to how ICTs are deployed. Gendered variables include micro-enterprise and
other household obligations, literacy, women’s triple burden, gender-based violence, and
cultural norms, all of which are often neglected or totally ignored in ICT policy and
projects such as the CICs—and the OLPC.
One Laptop Per Child
The One Laptop per Child project emerged from the global dialogues of the early
21st century of ICT4D and digital divide, narrated above. The OLPC Foundation is a
non-profit organization of the MIT media lab with the mission to provide the world’s
poorest children with low-cost laptops. The Foundation, led by Nicolas Negroponte,
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initiated the project and oversees the development of software and hardware. The project
also is supported by the Miami-based One Laptop per Child Association, which oversees
deployment of the laptops and country partnerships.
The laptop, originally dubbed the “$100 laptop” and later the XO laptop, was
debuted at WSIS in Tunis in 2005. The campaign was officially rolled out in 2007, just
in time for Christmas, with a “give one, get one” campaign, encouraging people in North
to buy one and at the same time give one to a needy child in a developing country. The
OLPC web site and other literature frames the XO as a powerful learning tool that will
bridge the digital divide and enable children in the global South to literally “leapfrog”
into the digital age. OLPC’s mission statement:
We aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected
laptop. To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for
collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of
tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create
together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter
future.3
The gadget is designed with the needs of the poor children in mind in terms of the
rugged design, an open source Linux based operating system, low energy consumption,
and non-glare screen, which can be used outdoors. Thus far, OLPC has been exported to
over 40 countries, 10 of them in Africa. There are five core principles. A foundational
premise of the project is embedded in the name One Laptop per Child, the idea that each
child gets his or her own laptop to keep forever, thereby giving the kids ownership,
access whenever they want, and also presuming they will pass on digital skills to their
friends and family members. Second, there is a focus on young children ages 6 to 12 to
3
http://one.laptop.org/about/mission, accessed 16 October 2014.
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give them an early foundation for their education via the laptop. Third, a key idea is that
no one gets left out, so the laptops need to be ordered in large numbers to supply whole
schools, communities and beyond. Fourth, there must be connectivity—the laptops are
connected to each other and to the internet.4 Fifth, the laptop has free and open source
software, the Linux system, which allows the laptop to grow and adapt according to the
needs of the children.
Since its inception the project has been fraught with controversies, though, and
has faced competition from other low cost laptop producers targeting the South as an
emerging market. The nature of these turf battles over market, production and
distribution, reveals the underlining economic imperatives of these efforts. Contrary to
the earlier vision of what was deemed as a $100 laptop, the costs of the XO grew to over
$200 and required governments to pay in advance for many thousand.
As part of the OLPC’s mission of reaching the world’s poorest children, Africa
was particularly targeted and featured prominently in OLPC literature, especially the
early literature, due to its persistent representation as the poorest continent that could
benefit tremendously from investment in technology. In fact, though Africa has 15
percent of the world’s population, it has just around 7% of the world’s internet users, and
a large portion of those are in just a handful of countries, such as Egypt and South
Africa.5 Currently the OLPC has exported the XOs to ten African countries, with by far
The OLPC recently has backed away from insisting on internet connectivity, as this
has proven unrealistic in some settings, as in Ghana.
5 For data, see ITU (2011, 2013a, 2013b). Recognizing that national and regional
comparisons obscure complex social intersections, both household and individual
data show that Africa continues to have the both the fewest number and lowest
percentage of internet users compared to other regions.
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the largest deployment in Rwanda (110,000 laptops). The other nine numbers are:
Nigeria (6,100 laptops), Ethiopia (6000), Cameroon (1,600), Ghana (1,000), Kenya (500),
South Africa (500), Mali (300), Uganda (300), and Mozambique (200).6
Today the OLPC’s rhetoric is more modest than in the early years of the
organization, and some reports state that OLPC is essentially history with Negroponte
moving on to other projects and the Boston offices now closed. However, OLPC Miami
is still servicing deployments in the largest adopter countries, Rwanda, Uruguay and
Peru, as well as tablets in the US and elsewhere.7 OLPC insists that the organization “is
thriving and making more inroads at bringing education to those who can’t easily access
it.”8 The truth is undoubtedly in the middle, that OLPC is alive but greatly scaled back.9
A 2013 strategic alliance with the Zamora Teran Foundation aims to revitalize the project
and has already delivered 30,000 laptops to Nicaragua.10 Many other initiatives continue
to deploy laptops and tablets to children in developing countries presuming that they will
constitute a powerful learning aid, enabling children to overcome other resource deficits,
and will help them learn to use ICTs and the internet. Several studies have evaluated
OLPC around the world, finding no difference between children with and without laptops
on learning indicators other than facility with laptops (e.g., James, 2009; Sibanda, 2009)
See http://one.laptop.org/map, accessed 16 October 2014.
See
http://www.olpcnews.com/about_olpc_news/goodbye_one_laptop_per_child.html,
accessed 16 October 2014.
8 See
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/leadership/news_flash_olpc_association_li.html,
accessed 16 October 6, 2014.
9 See http://gizmodo.com/one-laptop-per-child-isnt-quite-dead-yet-1541430670,
accessed 16 October 2014.
6
7
See http://blog.laptop.org/tag/zamora-teran-foundation/#.VEA_NLyW-vE,
accessed 16 October 2014.
10
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and also finding mixed reviews from teachers, who report that the laptops are somewhat
helpful but also a distraction, and that issues of maintenance, security, electrical power,
and connectivity remain challenging (e.g., Fagebe et al., 2013). None that I have found
thus far have considered gender or other intersections that may affect outcomes.
METHOD
The project involved open-ended interviews with Ghanaians involved with OLPC.
I started investigating the project in the summer of 2009, and between then and spring
2013 I interviewed approximately 80 people involved, including all of the teachers and
head teachers at two pilot schools, one urban and one rural (to be discussed), staff at the
Ministry of Education, staff of the Millennium Villages Project, and most of the children
in the pilot classes. After summer of 2009, I returned in February 2010 and spent three
weeks interviewing children and teachers at Kanda and visiting Bonsaaso. I did more
follow up interviews in July 2010, February 2011, July 2011, February 2012, July 2012,
and spring 2013.
I interviewed the children in the urban school individually and in groups, and
visited several of them in their homes as well. In the rural school I had limited time
because it’s very remote, so I interviewed the children in small groups. I worked with
three Ghanaian research assistants, who helped with translation and technology, as I
audiotaped all of the interviews and videotaped most of them as well.
In the individual interviews I asked the children basic demographics: age,
religion, where they live (neighborhood community), and who they live with, as they
have complicated families and often don’t live with parents. I also asked open-ended
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questions about experience with the XO laptop from the beginning to the point of the
interview, whether the XO was still functional, what they liked and didn’t like about it,
and who else used their XO. And I asked several questions about how they spend their
non-school time, before and after school and on weekends, including opportunities to use
computers or internet, and how other friends and family members use these technologies.
In follow-up group interviews I repeated the questions about use of non-school time and
access to and expertise with technology.
Initial interviews asked the teachers about their experiences and challenges with
the OLPC pilot and their own technology use. Interviews with Ministry of Education and
Millennium Villages Project staff were asked about the history of the project and their
own experiences and views of it. Follow-up interviews with teachers and government
reps asked more detailed questions about observation of gender divides in the project as
those themes began to emerge so clearly in the interviews with the children.
DISCUSSION
OLPC in Ghana
In Ghana the OPLC project was launched as a pilot in spring of 2008 in two
fourth grade classrooms, in an urban and rural school (see, e.g., Buchele & Owusu, 2007)
The project’s main champion was the late Minister of Finance and Economic Planning,
Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, who set up a Foundation to sustain and grow the project, but died
unexpectedly in September of 2008, shortly after the project was launched, and also just
before the election of 2008. After Baah-Wiredo’s death, the oversight of the project
shifted to the Ministry of Education. According to Maxwell Akornor, who was the
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Deputy ICT coordinator for the Ministry of Education, Baah-Wiredu met Nicolas
Negroponte in the very early stages of OLPC, attended a conference in the U.S. in 2006,
became very convinced and persuaded the then president John Kufuor sign onto the
project.
The urban school called Kanda Primary 5 is located in Accra near the slum
communities of Nima and Mamobi, and in fact, most of the children live in those
communities, and the majority are Muslim originally from the north, and belonging to the
Hausa ethnic group, which is patrilineal. Kanda Primary 5 is just one of 15 schools in
what is called the Kanda Cluster of 15 schools, all mostly in the same compound with
over 2100 students. The Kanda cluster was personally selected by the late Finance
Minister Kwadwo Baah-Wiredo who spontaneously promised the supervisor overseeing
the Kanda cluster that he would bring the laptops on a visit at the start of the new school
year in September of 2006. The cluster supervisor Victoria Gyamera, narrates what
happened:
Every year on the first day government ministers and sometimes the president
himself visits schools. I remember 13 Sept. 2006 . . the late Finance Minister
visited and said, ‘You know this compound is very neat. I’ve visited a lot of
compounds, but this one is very neat, so I’m bringing the One Laptop Per Child
Program here.’ On that day we arranged flowers and balloons and served biscuits.
We sang and he was impressed, and he promised to bring the laptop. So we were
waiting, waiting, waiting, and lo and behold, they brought the laptop. And in fact
he died shortly after . .
The rural primary school, in contrast, is located in Bonsaaso in Amansie West
District in at the western edge of Ashanti Region. The people there belong entirely to the
Ashanti ethnic group, which is matrilineal, and most say they are Christian. There are two
schools, a primary and a secondary, with a few hundred students. The majority of the
19
people in Bonsaaso are engaged in subsistence farming, small-scale cocoa farming, and
illegal gold mining called galamsey. There is no electrical power in Bonsaaso. Because
of the emphasis on cash crop farming, there is insufficient food production and nutrition
and food security is a major problem. Bonsaaso school was selected because it met
criteria, but especially because it is Millennium Villages community, and therefore
benefits from additional support from UNDP staff to advance the eight Millennium
Development goals, which include achieving universal primary education and promoting
gender equality and women’s empowerment and also emphasize using technologies to
achieve the eight goals. The start of the Millennium Villages Project led by economist
Jeffrey Sachs in 2005 and 2006 and the selection of Bonsaaso coincided nicely with
Baah-Wiredo’s interest in OLPC at the same time and the Ministry of Education’s desire
to choose a pilot school in a rural community and in an urban community.
This brief history illustrates how projects in the developing world commonly
unfold. A small handful of powerful government and development leaders, usually
men—in this case, a combination of Ghana’s late Finance Minister Kwadwo BaahWiredo, former president John Kufuor, Nicolas Negroponte and Jeffrey Sachs, are taken
with an idea and deploy the resources to carry it out, without broad consultation, and
certainly without engaging the agency or voice of recipients at the grassroots, as I will
discuss further below.
Project Outcomes
OLPC Ghana intended to expand from 100 laptops in two pilot classrooms in
2008 to a purchase of 1000, followed almost immediately by 10,000 more, and an order
20
of 1 million laptops planned for 2009. However, purchases beyond 1000 never were
made. My interviews and observations tell as story not so different from many others
over the past several decades—about the difficulty of sustaining technology intensive
projects in developing countries and about uneven benefits.
Many problematic themes emerged from the interviews, some common to both
the urban and rural school and some unique in each setting. Security and maintenance
constituted the overwhelming theme. Within a year of the pilot program, most of the
laptops in both the urban and rural school had been stolen or broken. They were dropped
in gutters, broken by friends who borrowed them, and many were stolen. The training
staff perhaps overemphasized their durability, and some of the children even tried test
this by using them as weapons and dropping them from high places. In Bonsaaso, one
child even dropped his in a cooking fire. As the population of students in these schools is
not stable, some left and took their XOs, and new students came without enough to go
around.
Relatedly, teachers complained that these children lacked the family support to
care for a laptop. Although the families of children in the pilot classes in both schools
were assembled and informed of the project at the outset in order to generate enthusiasm
and buy-in, most of them are barely subsisting and are not particularly supportive of their
children’s education. Therefore the security and use of the laptop was not a priority. In
fact, most of these children live in somewhat fluid family settings and may move between
parents, older siblings, aunties, and grandparents. Also truancy is common.
21
The children and teachers complained about the small size of the keyboard and
the laptop’s toy-like look, designed for U.S.-sized forth grader. In Ghana children come
to school as they are able. So in when I interviewed each child in Feb. of 2010 (in
Primary 6) they ranged in age from 12 to 22, even though one of the OLPC principles is
low ages, from 6 to 12. The average age in 2010 was 16, therefore 14 when the pilot
started. When asked which computer do you prefer, the XO or the type at the internet
café, almost all with an opinion preferred the big one at the café, because the keyboard
was better and the computer could do more, plus had internet access.
A major problem in both schools was electrical power. The urban school had
power, but the charging point was broken and giving the children shocks. It was never
repaired. The school relied on the children to charge their laptops at home, but even if
they did or could (and not all of them had power), the laptops did not hold a charge
longer than an hour or two. In Bonsaaso, which has no power, each child was given a
portable solar panel; however, those panels were quickly lost or broken. The headteacher
also pointed out that the Bonnsaaso area is very rainy and tends to be overcast many
days, often in the morning. School goes from 8 a.m. to 1, so an uncharged laptop might
not get charged in time to do anything with it at school. The project was given a
generator as back-up, but there was never money for fuel. Later because of the
Millenium Villages Project, a Community Information Centre with solar panels was built
and could be used to charge the laptops; however, by then most of the original 100 were
long gone.
The children received most of their XO laptop lessons via a server, which was
loaded with standard lessons from the OLPC foundation, primarily in math and science.
22
Plus the XO laptop has programs for writing, drawing, photography and games. No
culturally specific lessons or content ever were created, which in theory is an advantage
of open source systems such as Linux. The server at Kanda 5 broke in May 2009, about a
year after it was installed, and finally it was stolen in June 2010. It was never fixed, even
before it was stolen, and was not replaced.
Teachers and students, particularly in Kanda school, complained that the XO
could not access the internet, that the internet was promised, but never delivered. In the
rural school, which had no power, access to the internet was donated by two of the local
cell phone companies. So the rural school without power had internet access, but since
the solar panels were quickly broken and it took time to charge the laptops regardless,
little time in the day remained for accessing the internet. Two years after the start of the
pilot a Community Information Centre opened in Bonsaaso with solar panels, shared
desktop computers, new XOs purchased via a grant written by university students, and
internet access. The Centre remains in use for rotating classes and community members,
though reliable power is an ongoing challenge due to wear and tear on the solar panels
and other maintenance issues.
None of the leadership team within the Kanda cluster were informed of declining
government support for the project. In the early days, particularly the spring through fall
of 2008, there were many visits from Ministry officials to check on progress, respond to
complaints and make repairs, but after that their visits started to taper and then they just
stopped coming. “They have forgotten about us,” was a frequent comment by teachers
and headteachers at Kanda.
23
When I made my second visit to Kanda school and my first visit to Bonsaaso in
February, 2010 almost all of pilot XO laptops at both schools had been broken, lost or
stolen. Also it was clear that the new government elected in 2008 was not intending to
expand the project as originally intended. Not only was the new government less
enthused, but the laptops cost more than what Baah-Wiredo was led to believe when he
first visited Negroponte. Between then and when the pilot batch of 100 and later the first
1000 arrived the cost went from $100 per laptop to $205. There are three million school
children in Ghana, and 18,000 primary schools. Most of the 100 laptops distributed to
the pilot schools were gone within a year and were not replaced. The other 1000 sat for
a year in boxes at the Ministry of Education until it was finally decided to distribute them
to 30 carefully selected schools in Ghana’s 10 regions—only to schools with electricity –
and for lab use, not individuals, which is contrary to the OLPC non-sharing philosophy. I
was told that the OLPC Foundation at one point threatened to take the government to
international court for breach of contract, first for failing to pay for the 1000, and then for
not keeping it’s promise the rest of the 10,000 contracted. Eventually only 1000 were
purchased. Since the contract was altered, the Ministry of Education felt that it didn’t
need to abide by its original promise to give the 1000 laptops to individual children, but
rather have them housed in labs. According to Rev. Emmanuel Dadebo at the Ministry
of Education and head of ICT during the OLPC Pilot,
The whole concept has been changed from that mandated by the OLPC—from
individual ownership to the lab concept and collective ownership. The one to one
solution isn’t the best here. It’s too expensive and not sustainable.
In October 2010, about six months after that interview, Rev. Dadebo announced
that the Government was officially suspending the project, citing access to power as an
24
obstacle. However, funding and politics constituted the main problem. There are three
million school children in Ghana, and 18,000 primary schools. A non-sharing computer
project simply isn’t feasible. With the change of government, there was no political
interest in sustaining the project.
Gender Analysis
Interviews with Ministry of Education officials confirmed that the Ministry of
Women’s and Children’s Affairs, which is legally mandated to assure attention to gender
government sponsored projects as well as assist in implementing national ICT4AD
policy, was never consulted, nor were other gender advocacy organizations. Yet several
such organizations exist in Ghana. According to Rev. Emmanual Dadebo, the ICT
Coordinator for the Ministry of Education at the time of OLPC, the Ghana Education
Service has a department called the Girl-Child Education Unit, responsible for assuring
gender equity in schools, including equal access to opportunities and information. Other
related organizations include Women in Technical Education, to encourage girls’
involvement in traditionally male dominated trades and professions, and Science,
Technology and Mathematics Education for Girls (STME). Abantu for Development,
previously noted, addresses women’s success in all areas of public life, including
education and politics. Yet none of these organizations were consulted in the planning
and implementing of the OLPC in Ghana.
Interviews with the teachers and children revealed an enormous disparity in ICT
conversancy between the boys and girls in both the urban and rural pilot schools, but
especially pronounced in the urban school. This should not be a surprise given prior
research showing males’ greater control of resources, including ICT’s in Ghana.
25
Research reviewed previously indicates gendered nature of ICTs access and use in
everyday practices (e.g., Kwami, 2010; Fair, et al., 2009; Kwapong, 2007).
The gender difference related primarily to norms around leisure time and café use.
I asked the children both individually and in groups whether they had computer and
internet experience before the XOs arrived, and also how they typically spend their time:
what they do in the morning before school, what they do after school, and what they do
on the weekend.
In the urban school, almost all of the boys had extensive computer and internet
experience before getting their XOs, and they continue to spend hours on the computer
and internet after school and on the weekends, primarily trying to make friends with
foreigners, watching sports, and playing games. Sakawa or internet fraud is a particularly
popular pastime of boys (Fair et al., 2009; Burrell, 2008, 2014). Most urban girls are
discouraged from visiting cafés, as they are considered an unsavory environment. Some
cafés prohibit girls from entering.
Of the 16 boys at Kanda 5 that I interviewed, all but one had used a computer and
internet prior to receiving the XO and continue to use the café regularly. Some examples:
“I go to the café three or four times a week. It costs 30 p (at the time, about 15
cents) for an hour. I watch movies and football clips. I can put in the name of my
favorite footballer and clips come up. I also like music.” Thahiru, 15.
“I go to the café after school everyday where I play games, chat with friends on
IM, and send email.” Joshua, 15.
“I go to the café so I can chat with the white man.” Isaac, 16.
“I spend two hours per day at the café watching football matches.” Husungu, 17.
26
Of the 18 girls interviewed, 14 had not used a computer and/or had been to a café
prior to receiving their XOs. Examples include the following:
“My grandmother won’t allow me to go the cyber café. She says ‘you are a girl,
and you are not allowed.’ But all the boys go.” Alberta, 13.
“I don’t go to the café because I don’t have any money and no time.” Gifty, 18.
“My brother won’t allow me to go to the café. Also I don’t have money to go.”
Favor, 16.
“I do not go to the café because they do not allow girls to enter. My brothers go.”
Gloria, 14.
The four girls who knew a little about computers and had some café experience
indicated far less time available than the boys and less facility as a result. For instance,
Faiza, 14, said, “I would go everyday if I could, but can only afford once a week.” And
Pricilla, 13, says that she goes maybe once a week for 30 minutes and just plays an art
game, as “I really don’t know about the internet.”
The fact that cafés in the Nima and Mamobi communities are gendered spaces
favoring boys and men and discouraging girls from entering is clear from these reports,
also supported by interviews with the teachers and prior research (e.g., Slater & Kwami,
2005; Fair et al., 2009; Burrell, 2008, 2012).
Additionally, the girls are greatly constrained by time and discretionary resources,
as they are needed to contribute to household chores and to the family income to a much
greater extent than boys. Most girls’ non-school time is taken up with chores and selling
in the informal market, whereas boys have much more leisure time, which they typically
spend at the café and playing football. Boys also report financial resources to spend at
cafés. Interview after interview revealed the same routine, particularly after school and
27
weekends: of girls cleaning, cooking and caring for siblings plus selling oranges, ‘pure
water,’ or whatever the family needed her to sell, sometimes until 11 p.m.; and boys
having considerable freedom to play football and go to the café with their friends. The
head teacher of Kanda 5 during the OLPC pilot, Elizabeth Frazer-Maizie sums it up as
follows:
If you are a girl and you enter a café that means that you are . . someone who
irresponsible. As for the boys, they allow them to do whatever they like, but the
girls should stay home and help their parents. That’s their culture. Most of the
students, the homes they are coming from, they do a lot of work—helping their
parents with the household chores, cooking, washing,baking, selling—that’s what
goes on in the Nima community. When they go home, they have to help with the
home, so they don’t have ample time to visit the café. As a girl, you have to
abstain, you have to live up to expectations before you marry.
During the five years that I visited the Kanda cluster of schools, it had one
computer lab with just a handful (between two and five) working computers and one ICT
teacher for 2100 students, and no internet. In spring 2013 a Ghana based company RLG
donated 24 laptop computers to the Kanda cluster, again to be shared by over 2000
students. But there was still no internet connection. So unless the children had access to
a café, they could not learn how to use internet. Few would learn much about the
computer given the large demand on the 24 laptops and one ICT teacher. Though the
children in the original pilot were in eighth grade and still at the Kanda cluster when the
RLG laptops arrived, they never used them and in fact, were surprised when I informed
them of the new laptops.
Hence, in spring 2013, five years after the start of the OLPC pilot program most
girls in the Kanda pilot classroom still had not used internet, whereas almost all of the
boys had experience and skills prior to 2008 and continued to build on those skills.
28
In Bonsaaso, without power, things ironically turned out a bit better than at
Kanda, at least for the girls. There, none of the children had ever used a computer before
the XOs came, as this is in a remote rural area without cafés. Once the XOs arrived, as
long as they lasted, the boys had more time to use them than girls, plus engage in football
and other discretionary activities. However, the gender divide doesn’t seem to be as
sharp as in the urban community, as many of the boys work in cocoa farming and illegal
mining and don’t have free time either. In interviews, both boys and girls revealed very
little leisure time. Yet when asked whether boys or girls have more free time, all of them
indicated that boys have more time and freedom.
Bonsaaso has a solar-powered community information center set up as a part of
the Millenium Villages Project, noted previously. Three students at the University of
Science and Technology in Kumasi wrote a grant and got 100 XO laptops for the Center.
So now, very close to Bonsaaso’s two schools, there is an ICT center with eight desktop
computers and 100 X0s. It has been staffed by a rotating ICT teacher doing the required
year of national service. The ICT teacher in 2011 was able to keep the center open
evenings, and said that children lined up to get in and the place was packed, with
approximately 25 percent girls in the mix. These were undoubtedly only the children
within close walking distance, as some live quite far from school. However, in contrast
to the stigma of cafés in the city, this is a safe environment for girls and boys with a
teacher staffing the place and helping children learn how to use the machines and access
the internet.11 Unfortunately, by spring 2012 the solar panels had weakened and the
The ICT teachers were not trained in how to educate the children about internet
use. Any instruction generally focused on using social media such as Facebook.
11
29
center could only be in use six hours per day, greatly reducing the accessibility of the ICT
lab during non-school time.
The fact that girls could readily enter the ICT center without stigma, versus in
urban Accra, perhaps in part reflects the Ashanti culture, which is matrilineal and does
give greater respect and voice to women and girls than other ethnic groups, such as the
Hausa in the North, the ethnicity of the majority in the Nima community in Accra.
Though this is speculation, it was a view voiced by several Ghanaians in discussions of
OLPC in the two communities.
Additionally, because of the Millenium Villages Project, Bonsaaso is served by a
gender education specialist, Cecilia Serwah, who comes from the area and works very
hard in the community to promote respect for women and girls and for girls’ education.
Her work has included starting the Peace and Love Gender club. According to Serwah,
the club first started with the girls because it was clear that they were not attending school
and many were getting pregnant at young ages. Later it became clear that clubs could not
succeed unless boys joined and invested equally, and that parents, teachers and
community leaders also needed to be involved. When I visited in March 2012 the Peace
and Love Gender Club was having a major fund-raiser with boys and girls participating
fully, including speeches and performances by the children and by community leaders.
The long-term outcomes of this club or other activities initiated because of the
Millennium Villages Project are unclear. Certainly the MDGs will not be met by 2015 as
many critiques (e.g., Munk, 2013) and casual observation indicate. Also I recognize that
both the Millennium Villages Project and OLPC are essentially outsider driven and top
down initiatives; therefore, their mutual support in the case of Bonsaaso does not
30
constitute an ideal model. However, the work of a local gender education specialist and
the existence of the ICT center are arguably good initiatives toward girls’ empowerment.
In contrast, no comparable resources exist in the Kanda Cluster of Schools in urban
Accra.
CONCLUSION
The outcomes in Ghana did not come close to matching up with the OLPC’s
principles, which further exacerbated the gender divide for computer and ICT use.
Primarily because of security and maintenance problems there is no longer one laptop per
child in any school in Ghana. Almost all of the original 100 XOs in the pilot project are
long broken and contributing to Ghana’s ewaste problem. Some XO laptops at the urban
school remained functioning but were collected and are no longer in use, much to the
dismay of their owners who were promised that the laptops were theirs to keep. Some of
the girls, in particular, complained that their functioning XOs were confiscated without
explanation. Bonsaaso and the few other schools ordering XOs are keeping them in labs,
contrary to the principle, but probably more consistent with collectivist versus individual
values in the culture. However, their effectiveness as an educational tool is questionable,
as studies elsewhere have indicated. The focus on early education ages 6-12 wasn’t
accurate as many teens and even young adults find themselves in primary school in
Ghana. The XOs are not being supplied in large numbers, as envisioned. In fact the
Government elected in late 2008 after the start of the OLPC suspended the program and
new deployments are small scale purchases by NGOs. There was never an internet
connection in the urban pilot school, and internet availability in Bonsaaso has been
somewhat sporadic. The free and open source operating system was not an advantage,
31
since Ghana hasn’t had the resources to create its own content and the teachers were not
trained in how to use the Linux system. Some feminist scholars argue that open source
platforms can be used for feminist purposes (e.g., see Kwami, Wolf-Monteiro & Steeves,
2011), but using these platforms requires knowledgeable activists. Because the Ministry
of Women’s and Children’s Affairs and other gender advocacy groups were not
consulted, nor were recipients at the grassroots, the project neglected to consider gender,
ethnicity and other intersections that could affect what children bring to the experience of
the XO and therefore the ways in which the technology may widen rather than reduce
digital divides.
In the end, OLPC is one more lesson in the pitfalls of presuming that NGOs, other
aid agencies and government leaders can launch successful projects in a top-down
fashion, that new technologies or gadgets represent the best means of addressing
particular problems in developing countries, and that technologies can be easily adopted
and sustained without biases or negative side effects.
32
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