They initially targeted governments in the Global South and excluded North America, Europe, and other high-income countries (see http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/childrens_machin... for a summary of their thinking early on). This did shift over time, though.
Even NGOs were initially blown off - Negroponte initially said they'd only sell lots of no less than one million to governments directly. But when they didn't get any firm takers in the first couple of years of the project, they started loosening those requirements, which is how Paraguay Educa even got their foot in the door (with a project that initially only had 4000 laptops, later increased to around 10,000).
There was a rather badly-managed OLPC project in Birmingham, Alabama. I have a paper co-written with Mark Warschauer and Shelia Cotten on it - once my website is back up it'll be available here: https://morganya.org/research/Ames_OLPC_Birmingham.pdf
It seems true to me that the easiest way to maintain a device is to build it well in the first place. This is quite challenging if your primary concern is cost. Most people who have ever purchased a Sony Vaio laptop can probably attest that they got great specs at a reasonable price, but every Sony Vaio laptop that I have purchased ended up with parts (the charger port, the power button, etc) falling off or minor components failing.
You probably noticed that in Paraguay at least, the problem you describe has some cultural roots. Disadvantaged communities have at times received free stuff that they either rejected, failed to care for, or altogether destroyed. It may be due to a sense of resentment for having received the gift, or perhaps they lacked sufficient buy-in to understand the market value of the free items. Sometimes, the free stuff does not actually fit the needs of the recipient. And usually, there is a sense of contempt from Paraguayan society at large no matter how the recipients respond (a la "look at these ungrateful paupers who don't dance for joy as we spend resources on them").
Furthermore, in Paraguay a gift given without strings attached is often doubted anyway, because it may be viewed as a means to manipulate the recipient by making them feel indebted. The smooth way to give someone a thing of value in Paraguay is to make them believe that they have somehow earned it due to preexisting factors, or alternatively to state an innocuous and clear expectation for how the gesture will be reciprocated in the future.
Anywhere you go, the recipient of a gift values the gift based on his or her own understanding and needs.
Look up the construction of houses in Itaguá for residents of the Chacarita for one example.
I can't find the text right now, but I recall reading about houses built for indigenous folks in the Chaco. When representatives of the organization that had built the structures returned the following year, they saw that the recipients had dismantled the wooden doors and burnt them for warmth during the winter.
There's also the factor of theft, and sometimes the stolen items are surprising. The school in Cateura where the famous Recycled Orchestra came to be is one such case. At a certain point in time, they had been gifted many instruments (think Yamaha and Vincent Bach) but someone had broken in at night to uninstall and steal the school's only toilet.
There does exist some parts and repair infrastructure in many Latin American countries, as well as a secondary market for devices. There are challenges in finding parts that are neither counterfeit nor stolen, and in my experience the most capable technicians (in terms of tools and knowledge) tend to be located nearer to affluent communities. Traditional devices have a better chance of tapping into that extant marketplace than do purpose-built devices designed intentionally for the economically disadvantaged.
Interestingly, in Paraguay the kids who did use their XOs much at all generally installed another windowing system. There was a nice easy package that even not-very-tech-savvy kids could install, I think put up by a hacker group in Uruguay (I'd have to check my notes on that one) with instructions in Spanish, that also came with some simple videogames and a video/audio player. Sugar was really not designed for media consumption, and that's what interested many of the kids!
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What was your opinion of Caacupé? Did the prevalence of Guaraní language among certain families present any difficulties for in-classroom use of OLPC devices? Was there a correlation between Spanish language competency and OLPC uptake/time-to-failure?
As with many projects, there was quite a range in acceptance/uptake! Language was certainly a factor (more rural schools - which were also poorer on average - tended to be more Guarani-centric), but I would say that based on my observations it was not the most significant factor for uptake at school or at home.
In the classroom, bigger factors that limited uptake were breakage, drained batteries (most classrooms had minimal charging capacity, and even that capacity had been installed by Paraguay Educa), uninstalled software, and lack of teacher time/resources to develop curricula and work around all of these issues. Paraguay Educa hired teacher trainers in early 2010 and had a rotating tech support team to help with these issues, and this extra staff made some headway, but that kind of ongoing cost wasn't something the small NGO could sustain, unfortunately. (I have a long discussion about funding for charismatic new projects vs. maintenance/sustainability of existing projects in the book - as with many tech projects, maintenance was certainly a big issue!)
Kids who used them at home did tend to be stronger in Spanish, but relatively few were using them much at all, Spanish-speaking or not. While I didn't see improvements in reading or math among those who were part of the project there between 2010 and 2013 testing (though the testing was really not my focus - the observations and interviews were - we still ran them), it's common in other 1:1 programs to have modest gains in literacy because enough kids are motivated to practice reading to make sense of what they encounter on the Internet.
I hope this helps! Happy to clarify or answer follow-ups!
