In January 2005, MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte announced the One Laptop per Child program (OLPC), which was intended to improve education in poor countries by putting $100 laptops in the hands of schoolchildren (see "Philanthropy's New Prototype," November/December 2006). The laptop would not go into production, Negroponte declared, until OLPC had received five million orders from governments around the world.

Almost three years later, however, the program's two largest customers were Peru and Uruguay, which together had ordered slightly fewer than 400,000 units. So in November 2007, OLPC began manufacturing laptops anyway, at a cost of roughly $188 apiece. At about the same time, OLPC began its holiday-season Give One Get One drive: any donor who contributed $399 to the project would receive a complimentary computer, and a second would be sent to a poor community. The drive raised $35 million to "bootstrap" laptop programs in countries including Mongolia, Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, each of which will initially receive around 10,000 laptops.