India’s Datawind recently introduced a $35 tablet, the Aakash 2, complete with a 7.5 inch screen, Android operating system and Wi-Fi available for as little as $2/month. BOOM! A $35 tablet. Need I say more?
What are the early indicators of such an inexpensive device’s impact in bridging the technology, education and digital divides that separate the third world from the first world? Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli is currently producing 3,000 tablets a day and forecasts that number to jump to 10,000 tablets per day in the next 2 months!
At one end of the world, massively inexpensive hardware devices (tablets, cell phones, etc.) are being produced for the one third of our planet’s population that is so often excluded from technological, economic and social progress.
At the other end of the world, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are being created for free by the elite higher education institutions of the world. These MOOCs offer free online college level courses to anyone who wants to take them. Ivy League University Professors, Community College Professors and new entrepreneurs are creating them alike. They’ve attracted investment from folks like the Gates Foundation and their rising popularity and disruptive potential to the status quo of rising costs and diminishing returns of higher education recently caused the New York Times to call 2012 “The Year of the MOOC”.
Do you recall the unsolvable children’s riddle: what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Well if that irresistible force is a free and excellent education and the immovable object is global poverty, we may have a new answer.
The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25/day. Imagine a young man or woman today, living in a third world country whose family lives in extreme poverty. That young or woman could conceivably have his country (as India is now embarking on) invest in a tablet (Aakash 2 or something comparable) and for less than 5% of their monthly income access digital courses from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. Third world infrastructure solutions that require design (roads, bridges, etc.), engineering (homes, sewer systems, etc.) and planning (finance) may no longer need to be conceived and implemented by the West, but by those same countries’ future architects, engineers and MBA’s trained by the best in the world, online.
