An IADB multisite study done in rural schools in Peru found significant impact in cognitive development between treatment and control groups. The OLPC project in Peru did not aim to improve Math and Language learning, a very improbable objective due to the poor average quality of public school teachers (a census evaluation in January 2008 showed 98.5% lacking basic arithmetic skills and over 60% lacking reading comprehension with a surprising 27% at a zero level of reading comprehension). Pitifully the results came out under a new administration and the lack of results in terms of math-language grades was happily exploited but the new government with ample support from Microsoft and Intel.
Peru had to deviate from some of OLPC’s and Negroponte’s design criteria because of Peru's very primitive Internet access (less than 3% coverage at the time of project deployment.) The Peruvian team developed the concept of “asynchronous” Internet access to deal with the requirement and developed an off-line application with 2GBytes of Internet pages available via memory sticks that were updated periodically. This was just an example of local implementation resulting of Peruvian scholars’ work.
In Peru, a enlarge implementation of Constructionist practice in the public school system had been underway since the 80’s which resulted in the implementation of a Quechua version of the Lego robotics program and a whole portfolio of methodology approaches that allowed Peru to implement the world’s largest School Robotics program integrated to the OLPC project in 2010.
In 2007-2008 Peru approved a national government initiative to implement OLPC, beginning with rural one-teacher multigrade schools (the poorest among the poor). The initiative required an ambitious deployment strategy, including solar power panels to provide power to the XO laptops and a countrywide teacher training program including the writing of a Teacher's Guide in Spanish (100% written by Peruvian scholars) and curation of easy to implement and execute activities. Amazingly, more than ten years after the initial deployment of the XOs, hundreds of thousands still work and are heavily used by teachers and students. Many Peruvian teachers developed applications have been recognized by independent stakeholders. The Una Laptop por Niño project in Peru ignited interest in Internet access and is the main reason school access went from 2.5% to more the 50% in ten years.