The 2019 Air is underpowered (1.6 GHz Dual-Core, 7W TDP[1]) even when comparing it to more affordable hardware from 2019 or secondary market business laptops from the prior 5 years or so.
The problem isn't that people are hogging all the CPU, the problem is that it's hard to get computers to people around the world, connect them to infrastructure (power, internet), and train people to use them. Plenty of smart people have actively tried to solve this problem and have failed. I'm not sure if adopting such a principle means anything whatsoever in the face of what appears to be a larger challenge than providing computing power to a willing yet deprived population.
[1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/189912/...