How can Brazil ensure everyone gets a quality education?

Claudio Sassaki and Eduardo Bontempo are Schwab Foundation 2015 Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awardees.

Brazil, with its heavy taxation and government regulation, is known as a challenging place for entrepreneurs. The country also has a tradition of poor educational indicators. Somehow, our project had to deal with these two challenges.

In Brazil, one needs an average of 107.5 days to open a business, according to the World Bank study Doing Business 2014. No wonder the country placed only 123rd among 189 nations in a ranking of the best environments for business worldwide.

The situation is even worse in education. In the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Brazil’s performance was poor. Its students ranked 59th among 65 nations in science, 58th in math, and 55th in reading.

Instead of looking to these numbers with skepticism, we saw them as an opportunity to make a huge social impact in Brazil. Since its founding in 2011, Geekie has made an impressive evolution. To date, we have given more than 3 million people the opportunity to use our adaptive learning platform for free, thanks to financial support from local NGOs and corporate sponsors. Examples like Manoel Lima, who lives in Brazil’s poor Northeast Region, show us that we’re on the right track. Manoel made intensive use of the platform and was admitted to a public university to study biomedicine. Attending university was something neither Manoel’s parents nor his more than 50 cousins have ever achieved.

Geekie has also learned a lot about the difficulties of doing business in Brazil and became very active in the local social entrepreneurship scene. The country has only something like 1,100 companies that fit this profile, but interest in the field is growing steadily.

The visibility we have achieved in the arenas of both social entrepreneurship and education led us to develop a broader project. We want to inspire a social movement aimed at guaranteeing quality education for all.

Some progress in this direction has been made in recent years. NGOs reached a pact with the federal government that included goals to be achieved in this and the next decade. In many cases, the goals are far from being reached, but Brazil has many good experiences of collaboration among government, private enterprise, and NGOs.

We think it’s time to sort out which projects and practices really worked in these partnerships and design a clear package of solutions that the public sector can adopt with the supervision of private partners and the additional expertise of international organizations. Technology that can enable us to overcome decades of low investment plays a central role in this package. And apart from adopting innovative solutions, federal and state governments should make a commitment to improve teachers’ wages.

We also want to bring society into this arena, taking a stronger stance in favor of quality education for all. One valuable asset is the enthusiasm of young people  – our public. Like Geekie, they believe there’s no time to waste because generations are being lost. It’s time to get things done.

This post first appeared on Medium. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Claudio Sassaki’s and Eduardo Bontempo are co-founders of Geekie, Brazil. Both are Schwab Foundation 2015 Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awardees.

Image: Children walk past a mural at Morro Santa Marta. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino.