Yesterday I wrote about KIVA and I’ve mentioned “One Laptop Per Child” before too on several occaisions.
Here’s an interesting story by Christian Science Monitor on “Nonprofit slips in race for cheap laptop for world’s poor kids
Problems at One Laptop Per Child show how social entrepreneurs can blaze trails but miss the payoff.”
Microlending started off from a charitable impulse. Kiva is a non profit that raises funds for other charitable organizations who make the loans for many small home based workers. They do charge interest, but whatever profits are plowed back into the enterprise if things are being done as promised. But now the big profit seeking banks want to play with the poor now that the non profits have proven it can work…
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is facing the same issue. I said in my very first post,I believed we’d see these $100 Laptops at Wal Mart eventually and I’m still expecting that to be true (or at $100 adjusted for inflation). And that’s how it’s playing out. OLPC has pioneered the method, identified the market, and done the heavy initial work of assembling the technology to say “this is doable, here’s how”. And now the profit seeking companies are saying “hey, let’s cash in on this”! Along the way one former partner of the OLPC project is bad mouthing it as they develop and secure orders for their own version.
Should social entrepreneur ventures be entered into with the idea that they will be ultimately phased out as the free market takes over? Probably so in many instances.
But there are other instances where formerly “non profit” enterprises like, for instance, drug addiction recovery, go from being non profit ventures with a heart to boutique operations to coddle the rich and famous and loot as much health insurance money as possible. Along the way they exert regulatory influence that shuts out the non profit sector that started the “charity” that became an “industry”.
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