Since 2008, philanthropic initiatives are celebrated through the BNP Paribas Prize for Individual Philanthropy. Winners of the 5th edition were announced at a ceremony held in Paris on the evening of June 20, 2012. Let’s focus on the Grand Prize Laureate.

The Instituto Ayrton Senna was founded in 1994 by Viviane Senna Da Silva Lalli, who had already decided not long before the tragic death of her brother to set up jointly with him an organisation to help Brazilian children. The aim of the Institute is to improve the quality and results of Brazil’s education system so as to be able to offer underprivileged Brazilian children a better life.

With the help of other members of her family, Viviane Senna Da Silva Lalli established this new foundation, with herself as President, which uses funds from her brother’s legacy, to optimise the quality of the Brazilian education system through a range of training programmes and teaching methods and materials, working in close cooperation with local and national authorities.

The Institute Ayrton Senna offers special teacher training to local government staff, who are selected by the national Education Secretary, and provides mentoring through a pyramid structure so as to enable the maximum number of school teachers to draw on the expertise of others, plus a series of educational programmes and a system of follow-up and pupil assessment in order to measure pupils’ progress and rapidly resolve any problems which may arise.

To date, some 16 million Brazilian children and young people have benefited from the educational programmes supported by the Institute, which has also provided training and mentoring to over 690,000 teaching staff in 1,530 towns across the country. The Institute’s own internal assessment system claims a 95% success rate in terms of the number of pupils completing their studies and obtaining a diploma, versus a national average success rate of just 30%.

Find out more about this year’s winners and their initiatives.