Ladoo.org

We try to give access to education to vulnerable children in developing countries. The focus in girls comes out naturally, as in many of the countries we work with, girls have less access to education than boys. Besides contributing to give more equal opportunities to all, we reduce technological waste through the reuse of old laptops in developed countries.

We find that universal and free educations is the premise solution of most of the problems in our economies. We trust very much in the positive economic externalities it brings to catalyse economic development and we believe a fairer world is possible.

We are feminists, understood as the urgent need for giving girls and boys the same opportunities and rights. Women have in certain parts of the world worse access to education than men. The bias of Labdoo in favour of women, comes as a natural consequence. 

About 264 million children and adolescents around the world do not have the opportunity to enter or complete school. Besides this, the world retires every year hundreds of millions of computers that are still in perfect condition. Taking these two realities into account, LABDOO aims at providing powerful educational laptops and tablets to every school in the planet using global collaboration without incurring any economic nor any environmental cost. LABDOO makes it possible by sanitizing and loading computers with learning software, so they can become a very powerful tool to unlock education around the world.

We are currently working with 1800 schools, strictu senso at least 29 of them are specifically addressed to women. Many more are pulling girls into education. 

Labdoo is a global non-profit social network which allows unused laptops loaded with educational applications to reach schools throughout the world without incurring any economic or environmental cost to the Planet. Thanks to our global collaboration strategy and technology, the Labdoo humanitarian platform has grown to support over 1000 schools in more than 120 countries, benefiting more than 325,000 students from around the globe.

The world buys more than 400 million laptops and tablets every year, yet about 4 billion people on the planet still don't have access to digital educational technologies. Labdoo is on a mission to resolve this paradox by interconnecting acts of goodwill globally coordinated via the Labdoo social network to bring all our unused laptops and tablets loaded with powerful educational software to the most needed places in the planet.

The Labdoo technology uses a unique globally coordinated approach allowing anyone in the world to participate in the mission of bringing educational devices to schools. This approach is powerful as it allows the platform to be sustainable via two main pillars: (1) acts of goodwill and (2) excess capacity (such as unused laptops and tablets). 

Children. Essentially poor kids in developing countries. Most of them, girls who are the first victims in not having access to education.

Besides nutrition and health, providing this girls with education is the only chance they would have to change their destiny.

Education, is the only masterpiece solution for skip the property trap most of them are condemned to live in.

And that is our goal: proving them with the instrument to decide or at least getting to know that eventually there is an option to decide.

Helping girls and women to achieve equal rights than men, means facing different parallel problems. Most of the discrimination against women ate early stages happen in the developing world. 

The unavoidable premise to change this fact on the field, is through education to both, boys who will become future male adults in that society and girls. If we do not educate generally and gender-inclusively, we will lose those girls soon or later. 

Our approach to education is not based on gender, but it results in placing Laboo.org as a good instrument certain girls could use to have an opportunity.

Labdoo is a new way of understanding international cooperation. 

Through Labdoo, international cooperation becomes a one sum game. There is no opportunity cost to consider and we hit to goals at once: we recycle a laptop and we give an opportunity to a human who would probably never had any otherwise.

Labdoo's collaborative strategy makes the Project ‘perpetually sustainable’ and provides a scalable solution to equipping all schools with powerful computing technology.

Labdoo is a global organization built from the ground up in the digital world. Developed as an online platform, Labdoo utilizes state-of-the-art social network technology to coordinate a global human chain of goodwill actions bringing unused but powerful laptops to the most remote and needy places in the planet.

The Labdoo process works as follows:

-Laptop and tablet donors and helpers from anywhere in the planet tag their retired devices by going to www.labdoo.org. The tag provides a unique global identifier to track the devices through Labdoo's dashboards: https://www.labdoo.org/content...

-Volunteers from places anywhere in the planet called hubs (universities, companies, NGOs, homes, etc.) sanitize the laptops following the Labdoo tools: https://www.labdoo.org/content...

- Using Labdoo's dootrip technology, devices are transported to remote schools without increasing the planet's carbon footprint: https://www.labdoo.org/content...

- Once deployed, donors and participants receive a notification with pictures of the kids using the devices and all participants, e.g.: https://www.labdoo.org/content...

(see schools dashboard for full list: https://www.labdoo.org/content/edoovillages-dashboard)

Labdoo is implemented mostly in PhP and JavaScript code. The source code is freely and openly available under the GPLv3 License. 

The current version of the Labdoo platform is based on Drupal, a free and open-source content-management framework distributed under the GNU General Public License. Its main features are implemented using standalone modules. This helps to keep the project modular, facilitating the process of managing, maintaining and collaboratively developing the platform.

Since Labdoo is an open digital platform, we can measure with precision the capacity and impact of the global Labdoo network. As shown from the devices dashboard (https://www.labdoo.org/content/dootronics-dashboard), at the time of this writing Labdoo has collected 23,428 computers, of which 17,288 have been sanitized and delivered to 1,802 schools, helping a total of 562,192 disadvantaged students in 137 countries, saving 371,049 Kg of CO2 emissions and using a network of 305 hubs. From its dootrip dashboard (https://www.labdoo.org/content/dootrips-dashboard), Labdoo has activated 1520 global CO2-neutral routes with a capacity to carry 8,432 devices.

In addition to the above metrics, Labdoo puts substantial effort in understanding the qualitative impact of the project at each school. Every school has its own dashboard which allows the system to track progress and impact. The dashboards provide also an option for the schools to write their story and provide feedback on how the laptops are helping them. See for instance these unique stories:

Labdoo is a collaborative humanitarian social network which is designed to help bring laptops and educational devices to schools in need without incurring any economic or environmental costs.

In the world, those who have access to free sources of education (FSE) are the rare exception. This is a problem because:

1. It leads to inequalities between those who have access to FSE and those who don't.
2. The potential talent of most of the children in the world and the societal benefits that would arise from it are lost.

This reality is commonly known as the 'digital divide'.

A laptop allows schools to gain access to FSE, helping to unlock the skills and potential capabilities of children and students. This can be achieved via offline education software that comes installed in the laptops or via online education content. 

Labdoo exists as 'a tool' to help sustainably coordinate the mobilization of unused educational devices and to bring them to needy schools using global collaboration, without incurring any economic cost and without damaging the Planet.

Labdoo is providing 562,192 students with education today. We were able to grow project Labdoo by 1000X, going from one school to more than 1000 schools. Our next goal is to scale another 1000X to reaching million schools.

Keep on growing and spreading free education to those who need it, while reducing digital waste.

Initially we bootstrapped Labdoo using a simplified 1.0 platform and in 2015 we released a state-of-the-art version 2.0 that allowed Project Labdoo to grow at an annual rate above 30%. Our strength comes from the fact that Labdoo is a self-sustained project requiring practically no money to run its operations, since we only need three ingredients that exist in abundance: unused laptops, people’s goodwill and platform technology breakthroughs.

The fact that we don’t rely on capital to sustain our operations removes the risk of running out of investment, one of the main risks any non-profit project usually faces.

Having designed from the ground up a project that is sustainable and having removed from the equation the cash-flow risk, we foresee two main risks:

- The risk of running out of momentum. Labdoo is all about collaboration, uniting global goodwill acts. We are on a good momentum, people love to participate to help bring laptops to schools, but we are aware that momentum needs to be properly fostered so we can continue to grow and reach even more schools. Otherwise our growth potential could be stifled.

- The risk of not tapping into the full technology potential. Communication, computing and social network technologies advance fast. To fully unlock the potential of Labdoo, we need to constantly ensure the Labdoo platform uses state-of-the-art algorithms and software.

Getting more people to know Labdoo and eventually pulling in some volunteers would give us the tools to overcome these barriers as we have done before in the past. The promotion that challenges such as SOLVE potentially give us, is the necessary push to keep on growing.

We are around 4000 volunteers. The executive team is formed by a dozen people from different parts of the globe, including: US,Germany, Spain Switzerland and New Zeland.

Basically, because we believe in a better world and we are ready to get it through altruistic acts. We truly believe in education for achieving gender equality and progress in developing countries.

We are coders, diplomatics, economists, engineers..but above all we are people who want to contribute with their time and expertise to something beautiful which could eventually make other people's lives better.

The mechanism to deliver Labdoo's mission is via the creation of a humanitarian social network. This social network provides the following functions:

• It provides an efficient way to organize information: identification of sources of demand, supply, laptops, dootrips, QA resources, etc.
• It provides a way to break down a very large mission (solving the digital divide) into a very large number of very small tasks (tagging, sanitizing, storage, dootrip, etc.). Each of these tasks becomes so small that its cost is negligible.
• It provides a way for everyone to be part of the solution (community building). Every person can have his/her own mini-mission.
• Since all the information and activities are openly available through the humanitarian social network, it provides transparency.
• As a flat humanitarian project, it helps to break barriers and stereotypes between the beneficiaries and the benefactors. For instance, in the Labdoo network, aid can originate from the developing world and be received by the developed world.
• It is fun.

We do not receive money. We explain it very well here:

https://www.labdoo.org/content...

We think that SOLVE would push Labdoo further in the expansion of hubs and the pulling in of more "laboodoers".