Research Insights: Do Children Benefit from Personal Laptops in the Long Run?

The OLPC program, designed by a team at the MIT Media Lab, aimed to improve educational outcomes among low-income primary students around the world by providing affordable personal laptops. The government of Peru launched its national OLPC program in 2009 targeting the nations most impoverished regions. Improving learning outcomes was a critical goal considering that only 14% of second grade primary students met the national mathematics standard and 23% did so for reading in 2009. While similar initiatives were implemented worldwide, their long-term impacts remain underexplored. This study focuses on 531 public, multigrade, rural primary schools, assessing the program's impact on academic achievement and grade progression through 2019.