The Ambitious Goals Of Brazil’s Second-Richest Man

Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann doesn’t live in Brazil, having decamped long ago to Switzerland. The biggest chunks of his nearly $24 billion fortune lie not in Brazilian firms but in global brewer AnheuserBusch Inbev and a couple of American food companies, KraftHeinz and Restaurant Brands International. However, when it comes to philanthropy, Brazil’s second-richest man is all in on his native country—and his goals are big.

Lemann, who is extremely press shy, was in the San Francisco Bay Area in early April for the first ever Brazil At Silicon Valley conference, a gathering of 700 people held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. He politely declined an interview, directing me instead to speak with Denis Mizne, the CEO of his charitable Lemann Foundation, who was also at the conference. 

“We want Brazil to be more fair and developed—and less unequal,” Mizne explained, describing the foundation’s main goal. “We are trying to transform the country.” He is working to achieve this by focusing on two main areas:  improving public education and developing a new generation of leaders for Brazil. Mizne would not say how much money the foundation is spending in its efforts.

The challenges with education are substantial. Iona Szurnik, a Brazilian who formerly worked in education for the government of Rio de Janeiro state, reeled off a list of grim statistics during a panel she moderated at the conference. Of Brazil’s 48 million students, 85% attend public schools; one quarter of those drop out before entering high school. Of those who finish high school, only 35% can read and write Portuguese at grade level, while just 18% perform at grade level in math. Among 8 and 9 year olds, 55% cannot read.

To kickstart the education system, Mizne and the Lemann Foundation championed the creation of a national learning standard for Brazil—something that is common in many countries. Before its creation, every Brazilian school could teach subjects without a yardstick to be measured against. Working with a variety of people and organizations, the Lemann Foundation pushed the Brazilian government to get learning standards developed over the course of four years; the standards were delivered to the National Education Council by the Ministry of Education in 2017.

A classroom management program that the Lemann Foundation developed has been tested in Mizne’s next goal: By 2022, every student in every classroom should be meeting those learning standards. Doing so means training teachers, which the foundation supports. It’s also developed a classroom management program that, working with the government of the state of Ceara, it implemented in classrooms in 2015. A study the next year showed a 10% increase in instruction time by teachers who used the program.

To develop the next generation of Brazilian leaders, the foundation has been funding the cost of undergraduate and graduate degrees and living expenses for promising Brazilians at a number of universities including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UCLA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Yale and Oxford University in England. The “Lemann Fellows” are a select group of Brazilians studying education, government and public health. To date there are 591 Lemann Fellows, 45% of whom are working in the public sector, for nonprofits or at international organizations. Iona Skurnik, a Lemann Fellow who got a masters in education policy at Stanford and now serves on the school of education’s advisory board, said the experience was transformative.

Twenty Lemann Fellows ran for office in Brazil last year—and seven were elected. Among the winners: 25-year-old Tabata Amaral de Pontes, who grew up in a poor neighborhood in São Paulo and studied political science and astrophysics at Harvard, where she wrote her senior honors thesis on “The Politics of Education Reform in Brazilian Municipalities.” She took office in February this year as a Federal Deputy for São Paulo in Brazil’s Congress.  Another winner: Felipe Rigoni Lopes, who has been blind since he was 15; he studied public policy at the University of Oxford and, at age 27, became the first ever blind person elected to Brazil’s Congress.

The Lemann Foundation has garnered support in its leadership development efforts from like-minded groups. In 2018, an alliance was formed by the Humanize Foundation, supported by Brazilian billionaire Jose Roberto Marinho; the Brava Foundation, founded by Lemann’s billionaire business partner Carlos Sicupira; and the Republica Institute. “Humanize is proud to be part of an alliance … to ensure that highly skilled individuals will take leadership positions in government and civil society organizations,” Georgia Pessoa, the executive director of Humanize Foundation, said in an email.

Mizne and his alliance partners have much work to do in a country rife with political turmoil. In 2016, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was ousted amid impeachment proceedings. Her predecessor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, was convicted of money laundering in 2017 and is serving a 12-year prison sentence; he denies wrongdoing.

Mizne is hopeful that the young people the Lemann Foundation has backed can make a difference in his country—and he’s in it for the long term. Says Mizne: “If they are committed, we will support them for the rest of their lives.”