Can One Laptop per Child Reduce Digital Inequalities? ICT Diffusion Patterns under Plan Ceibal

The study of information and communications technology (ICT) adoption signals that diffusion processes within highly unequal societies produces a stratification in the access to digital technologies and thus, maintains or even increases previous socio-economic disparities. Whereas technological utopians believed that One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)-like programs could reduce societal inequalities, the economic literature studying their consequences mostly focused on student's human capital. Results found no impacts, even for successful programs such as Uruguay's own OLPC-inspired Plan Ceibal. We use an event-study approach to difference-in-differences to identify the impact of Plan Ceibal on the household demand for technological goods across income quintiles. Our results show that Plan Ceibal helped to bridge domestic digital disparities in terms of access to PC for low-income households and favored the demand for internet services. We argue that two diverse mechanisms are behind these results. Regarding PC access, whereas Plan Ceibal was conceived as a universal program targeting primary level students attending public schools, both poverty infantilization and dual-system educational stratification made the policy to exhibit heterogenous impact across different income groups. Regarding household connectivity, we argue that Plan Ceibal reduced the cost of the bundle required to consume internet services at the time of the study, impacting on those households with both reasonable shares of children attending a public school and sufficient income to afford the monthly internet charges.