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COVID-19 and the Digital Divide

Students in Peru use laptops from the OPLC Initiative. The initiative asserted its goal to revolutionize education in the developing world through the distribution of innovative software and educational devices. When Negroponte pitched the idea at a Tunis summit, a participant emphasized the greater urgency of facilitating the obtainment of “clean water and real schools.”

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the capacity of education technology to overcome the the national and global digital divide was already under debate. In late December of 2019, blogger Audrey Watters published a commentary highlighting ed tech’s exacerbation, appropriation, and oversight of the structural inequalities — including educational, racial, social, and economic inequities — that constitute the digital divide. Watters discussed the catastrophic failures of the self-serving projects of Ed-Tech philanthropists and initiatives, such as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) Initiative.

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