Uruguay has completed their plan of equipping every student in the country's public primary schools with an XO Laptop computer. The final count of the computers was 396,727 laptop computers. The project is not completed because not all of the schools have connectivity yet and teacher training is still ongoing.
With this achievement Uruguay pulls far ahead of other countries, including the most developed, in equipping its schools to make effective use of information and communication in technology.
One of the remarkable things about Uruguay's achievement is that the total cost, including the laptops, maintenance, connectivity and teacher training amounts to only 5% of country's education budget.
Finland recently became the first country in the world make access to highspeed Internet a legal right. International institutions like the UN hafa promoted access to communications technology as a human right at least since UNESCO's MacBride Report (Many Voices One World) was published in 1980. Several countries have indeed defined access to communications technology as a human right, such as France and Estonia, but Finland is the first to legally mandate access and to go as far as requiring broadband access, as opposed to just any old technology. Hooray for Finland!