OLPC Support Strategy

One Laptop Per Child provides assistance throughout the different stages of a deployment, focusing on three major types of support: Operational, Educational, and Technical.

OLPC believes building local capacity in both educational and technical fields is the key to self-sustained deployments and to the fostering of local project ownership. OLPC strategy entails pre-deployment training of core team and ongoing remote post-deployment support (via email, phone, or chats) dependent on the needs of the project.

OLPC provides free support to projects of any size. For projects with orders larger than 25,000 units, OLPC sends Educational and Technical Support staff to the country of deployment for one week of comprehensive technical and educational training. This also applies to smaller orders (5,000+ units) that have the potential for significant growth in a short period of time. For projects exceeding 50,000 units, the initial training can be extended to two weeks with 2 additional week-long training sessions within a 12 month period.

Follow-up visits to a country are on per request basis; additional educational training can be provided 2- 3 times per year after the initial training. In-country training costs (excluding facilities and supplies) are covered by OLPC, although sponsors typically provide suitable lodging for OLPC staff. In certain particularly challenging environments can OLPC provide full-time in-country staff, including project managers, technical directors and learning directors. The costs of this level of OLPC service are negotiated at the time of the request.