She was destined to be a teacher but fate had grander plans for the young Graça Simbine. Born in 1945 in rural Mozambique, the youngest of six children, she survived the dismal conditions of Portuguese colonial rule, and rose to being one of the most influential women on the continent.
However, ambition distinguished her early on. A prodigy, Simbine consistently found herself at the top of her class at the missionary schools she attended. Her academic talent led her to become one of the first Mozambican women to win a scholarship to study at the University of Lisbon in 1968 where she focused on German Philosophy and Linguistics.
Moved by the plight of those she left behind during her time in Europe, she became increasingly politicized and began campaigning for the independence movement back in Mozambique. Courting the attention of Portuguese authorities and facing arrest, she eventually abandoned her studies to join FRELIMO [Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or the Mozambique Liberation Front], a political movement that retains substantial popular support to date. Her first posting was as teacher at a school run by the movement in Tanzania where she taught languages and served as deputy headmistress.
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Respected by her peers and senior officers, as a courageous and articulate member of the movement, Simbine found herself taking on greater responsibility within the movement. On one of those assignments, stationed in Mozambique in 1973, she met Samora Machel, then commander with FRELIMO. They married a year later.
Her standing within the movement earned her an appointment as the country’s first post-independence Education Minister. She held the post for over a decade. During that time, she put in place the foundations of Mozambique’s education system. One of her achievements was pushing primary school enrolment rates from 40% to over 90% for boys and 75% for girls, an absolute increase of 1.5 million pupils nationwide. Today, she remains deeply passionate about ensuring universal access to education for every child, not only in Mozambique but across the globe.
For Machel, education is not merely a right, it is the means to a greater end; political and economic liberation.
“I believe that education is freedom, and it must provide our children with the skills they need to become who they want to be,” she said at a press conference announcing the launch of the African Leadership University (ALU) in Mauritius last month.
Machel believes education for every child is within reach and, despite resource constraints, Africa is capable of providing world-class education to its professional and leadership cadres.
As an experienced policy-maker, Machel understands the importance of strong institutions in addressing intractable social challenges. Social institutions, Machel believes, must be designed to evenly empower citizens to achieve their individual and collective conditions. The challenges within the higher education system in Africa are only symptoms of a system that needs to be rethought.
“There is something quite courageous in interrogating the kind of education we’ve been providing our young people. Our children today are learning the same things that I was taught when I was in school in the 1950s. We never took the time to reimagine our education,” she says.
Commenting on the recent turbulence in South African universities, Machel points out that it is evidence of a systemic rather than a philosophical problem.
“This is not an emotional issue, it’s an issue of economics, it’s an issue of social justice. It is not only about higher education, but all the way down to early childhood development. This is the only reasonable way to look at it. There is a danger of #FeesMustFall playing against the students themselves. There is an issue on deciding who gets the benefits of the new system. We have not yet done the math.”
Machel’s voice on the issue matters.
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She has served as a Chancellor at the University of Cape Town and as President of the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her argument also makes sense. For an education system to fully play its social role, it must also be accessible to as many people as possible at every stage. The trick is to strike a balance.
“There are only about 100,000 [South Africans] in university today. What about the millions who need to go to secondary school, primary school or kindergarten? We haven’t navigated the mathematics of such a system. You can’t give to tertiary education without taking away from something else.”
Machel is confident transformative solutions exist and only need to be developed. She is currently focusing her energies on the newly-established ALU that is seeking to position itself as the premier leadership education institution in Africa.
“It’s important to look at the future of our continent in the eyes of the human capability that we have. Take the faces and voices of the young people who will come through these doors, we have to present them to Africa and then to the rest of the world,” she says.
ALU is built on “a resource efficient model that pioneers technology and innovative learning to provide high-quality tertiary education at scale”. The university plans to build 25 campuses that would each host 250,000 students each.
But even at those numbers, Machel argues that the university will only address a small portion of the continent’s education needs.
If the challenge today is to provide a solution at scale, Machel reflects, the long-term challenge is to develop institutions that are distinctively African, designed to solve the problems of today but constructed to stand the test of time.

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‘Education Is Freedom’

Acentury ago, the Governor of the Hunan province famously began a censorship trend in China, that later reached its nadir under Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, when he banned Lewis Carrol’s allegedly subversive literary waltz around the garden: Alice In Wonderland.
A few years ago, I found myself on the ragged borders of Hunan on an investigative trail that had taken me from rural Malawi to an obscure corner of China where 100 billion counterfeit cigarettes are mass-produced, literally underground, each year.
As I arrived to dig for tobacco, China’s pre-occupation with censorship continued to focus on the surreal in the present not just the past. Afraid that the so-called Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia would inspire similar insurgence in Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party had, as I drove across Hunan, declared an unlikely war on the small white flower, even banning its utterance from social media.
China likes to outlaw symbols of resistance. It regularly bans people too. Richard Gere and Brad Pitt, not exactly the most threatening of civil rights campaigners, will be unlikely to ever walk along the Great Wall of China thanks to their personal association with a humble Buddhist monk who has become the world’s most high profile blacklistee: the Dalai Lama.
The latest storm of controversy swirls around the South African government’s refusal to grant the Dalai Lama a visa to attend the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Cape Town in mid-October.
In 2014, as they have for much of the last 50 years, Beijing views Buddhism’s Yellow Hat as a meddlesome separatist trying to establish an independent Tibet. But he&#8217;s also a very effective tool that China uses to incrementally assert control in international affairs.
As far as Pretoria is concerned, we are in familiar territory. In 2009, Tibet&#8217;s exiled spiritual leader tried unsuccessfully to visit South Africa to attend a peace conference. Before then he had visited the country three times under Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.
Two years later, in 2011, the Dalai Lama hoped to attend the 80th birthday celebration of his friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but withdrew his request after not receiving a response from Pretoria. An angry archbishop later described his government&#8217;s handling of the visa application as mind-blowing.
A year later, South Africa&#8217;s Supreme Court of Appeal found that the country&#8217;s home minister at the time unreasonably delayed her decision on the Dalai Lama&#8217;s visa application and acted unlawfully in doing so.
Of course it is beyond dispute that the Rainbow Nation’s most recent point-blank refusal to grant entry to one of the world’s holiest figures has more to do with Beijing than Pretoria.
The furore around the rejection promoted the Dalai Lama’s fellow peace laureates, including Poland&#8217;s Lech Walesa, Bangladeshi entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Northern Irish peacemakers David Trimble and John Hume, to write a letter directly to President Jacob Zuma calling for a reversal of the decision. When the reversal didn’t come, the laureates cancelled their trip to South Africa.
What is most surprising to me is the low-key reaction to the latest rebuke in Asia. It speaks of a wider truth. Since China’s emergence as an economic superpower, the Dalai Lama is increasingly becoming the last person presidents and prime ministers would ever want to ‘Like’ on Facebook. As a consequence South Africa is far from the only nation in the world to ‘unfriend’ the 14th incarnation of the Buddhist holy seat.
Around the world, governments are increasingly limiting their contact with the Dalai Lama’s office. Most recently, Russia refused him entry. Those who refuse to kow-tow often feel the muscle of China. After the British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama in 2013, after Beijing warned him not to, China effectively cut off diplomatic relations. Cameron’s administration then spent a year working to get back in Beijing’s good books.
A more startling row over the Dalai Lama’s presence took place in the last place you would expect. Norway. A nation that has shaped a reputation for tolerance. When the Dalai Lama visited Norway in May, government officials allowed him to enter the country but refused to meet him face to face. Norway had previously found itself in the cold and its salmon exports to China decimated after it had chosen the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo as the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. History wasn’t about to repeat itself.
In the midst of the latest scandal, South Africa&#8217;s foreign ministry has, of course, stressed its visa decisions were taken independently of a desire to cultivate closer ties with China, its largest trading partner and co-member of the BRICS club of emerging economies.
Regardless, the country’s economic relationship with China deepens. In late 2007, China made the largest single foreign investment in South Africa since the end of apartheid, a deal for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the biggest lending bank in Asia, to take a 20% stake in South Africa’s Standard Bank, the country’s largest by assets. Last year, China emerged as South Africa’s foremost trading partner.
The deeper truth to the Dalai Lama’s exile and predicament can be found between the lines of academic study. According to a study by two European scholars, Andreas Fuchs and Nils-Hendrik Klann, inviting the Buddhist leader for dinner could ultimately end up costing you the earth.
In their study ‘Paying a Visit: The Dalai Lama Effect on International Trade’, they found that when a top leader meets with the Dalai Lama, that country&#8217;s exports to China will drop by at least 8.1% for roughly two years, and then return to normal – in the interim costing economies linked to China billions of dollars.
Perhaps it&#8217;s not surprising, then, that in 2001, the Dalai Lama met with 11 top leaders yet in 2013 met with only two. This trend of avoiding the Tibetan spiritual leader has been especially pronounced in northern Europe, not just in Africa.
But a greater reality in the modern world is the Dalai Lama’s political influence, like the strength of his tenure, spent entirely in exile, is fading fast. A man of compromise and dignity, he has long said he’d settle for autonomy within the Chinese state, but this has about as much chance of happening as China recognising Korea&#8217;s right to re-unification. Today, as China’s economy grows, Tibet’s state-supporters will continue to diminish.
Tibet has changed dramatically in recent years. On the political front, tension is still very much present but the wave of self-immolations that once dominated world headlines has diminished. Even the soldiers who were blocking most of the streets of old-Lhasa in 2008 are now gone.
Money seems to be having an impact on Tibet for better or worse. After having invested $15 billion on infrastructure in 20 years, and committing further $15 billion in the years to come, China has equipped Tibet with a reliable road network, five airports and a railway line anchoring it firmly to the nation. Greenhouse agriculture is developing, allowing a constant outflow of highly prized fruit and vegetables throughout the year. This year, 12 million, mostly Chinese, tourists made the trip, turning Lhasa into a tourist hotspot.
This, in itself, sadly lends a rather hollow ring to the words of the Dalai Lama himself: “Money and power facilitate, but it is clear that they are not the primary causes of happiness and solving the world’s problems.”

Why A Hello To The Dalai Lama Costs Billions

On a winter’s afternoon in July two men—born in the same country and infused with the same revolutionary fervor—will shake hands at the spot that changed their lives, to bury a 50-year-old grudge.
The men were among those arrested in the raid on Rivonia on July 11, 1963. Armed police with dogs used a delivery van, as a Trojan horse, to sneak into Liliesleaf Farm, in Rivonia; they arrested the entire leadership of the underground movement. The raid dealt a body blow to the South African liberation movement, not long after it had launched an armed struggle. In the resultant Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela, who had been in prison since his arrest in August 1962, was sentenced to life, along with his comrades.
The arrest at Liliesleaf was to send the lives of comrades Bob Hepple and Denis Goldberg spinning in opposite directions.
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Eighty-year-old Denis Goldberg—the bomb maker—who had returned from a trip to procure hand grenades, was arrested as he sat reading in the lounge. All were chained in a circle outside the thatched cottage, while the police encouraged their dogs to snap at them. He spent 22 years in prison after the judge handed him four life sentences.
“They gave me a 75% discount and I served only one,” laughs Goldberg, who often salves pain with humor.
It was a hard time in prison for Goldberg, who nursed the leader of his defense counsel, Bram Fischer, through his final days as he died of cancer. After the Rivonia Trial, Fischer had been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the state and sentenced to nine years.
In the other direction: Hepple suffered under interrogation; agreed to turn state witness; had charges withdrawn; skipped South Africa, via Botswana and Tanzania, for London; enrolled at Cambridge University, where he became a professor and a knight of the British realm.
Back in 1963, Hepple, the son of a former Johannesburg member of Parliament who was a meat wholesaler, Alex Hepple, was an underground activist, who had the misfortune of being at Liliesleaf on the day of the raid. Police had also caught the entire leadership of the underground as they held a meeting in a thatched cottage at the back of Liliesleaf: Govan Mbeki; Ahmed Kathrada; Andrew Mlangeni and Walter Sisulu. Behind bars, all were interrogated. The severity of the situation dawned on Hepple.
“The prosecutor told me all of us could expect to be sentenced to death,” says Hepple.
“This was not the reason for my decision. I never intended to give evidence for the state, but saw the prosecution’s offer to release me as an opportunity to escape. I discussed this possibility beforehand with Mandela, who said I had to take a personal decision, but if I could get the prosecution to release me: ‘That would be excellent.’ Had they not released me, I would have refused to testify against the other defendants, when called to the witness box.”
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In the cells, the other defendants were not so comfortable, especially Goldberg.
“At the time it was very distressing, because he might give information about us. His father told him that the minister of police, B.J. Vorster, had said they have enough evidence to hang Bob. And that if he wanted to get out he had to give evidence. I’m very relieved that he left the country and did not give evidence. At the time, it was hard to swallow. Now that I look back over the years, it’s a long time ago and I know, from my own experience, that people can be broken under pressure. And I had to draw the distinction between those who were broken and gave evidence and those who simply stopped and did not give evidence. Bob didn’t give evidence in court anyway.”
Nearly half a century on, Hepple, accused number 11, recalls the moment he walked free from the Palace of Justice in Pretoria.
“As I left the dock, Mlangeni said: ‘I am glad you are getting out of this,’” he says.
A sour taste lingered. Years later, Goldberg says that Hepple sent him a birthday card to the Pretoria prison. Goldberg remembers this with a smile.
“I told my wife that I never want to hear from him ever again,” he says.
Goldberg, who is now retired in Hout Bay, near Cape Town, was released in 1985 and escorted onto a plane to Israel, where his daughter was living. He spent the rest of his struggle days organizing for the ANC in London.
In the early days of freedom, Goldberg went to a party in London where Hepple was also a guest. The host said he didn’t want any trouble and Goldberg assured him there would be none.
“I saw Bob at the party, I held out my hand, but he walked straight past me,” says Goldberg.
Hepple remembers it differently.
“I admire and respect Denis and the other trialists and am always happy to meet them. Denis may have forgotten that we shook hands at a party in London, sometime after his release.”
Hepple thrived in the United Kingdom and enjoyed a distinguished legal career culminating in becoming a Professor of Law at Cambridge University between 1995 and 2001. He was knighted by Prince Charles, who was deputizing for the Queen, in 2004. The irony of a former wild-eyed terrorist being knighted by one of the heads of the British establishment, surely could not have escaped him as he knelt with the sword on his shoulder.
“I honestly can’t remember what was going through my mind. I may have been remembering Mandela’s parting words to me that I will not be judged by the past, but rather how I conduct myself in the future,” says Hepple.
Goldberg could have heeded the same words. He travels the world speaking and raising money for health and education and is at peace with the past.
“It is fifty years ago, I don’t have any anger about it anymore and too many people did too many worse things of betraying us, killing our own people and yet they were accepted back into society. So I have no bitterness against Bob at all. I believe he says we did shake hands, but I don’t remember,” he says.
When the two men shake hands on July 8, at Liliesleaf, near the spot where they were arrested, at a ceremony to commemorate 50 years since the raid; it will be a fitting place to close a circle born of struggle and strife.

The Healing Of Handshakes

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff recently encountered a young couple in their 30s, with a brood of young children and a hopeful outlook on the future. Until recently the father had driven a bus in Brasília, but thanks to an expansion of electricity and irrigation infrastructure, he turned previously unusable land in the countryside into a thriving vegetable farm, along with a side business raising chickens.
“How much do you make?” Rousseff asked him.
“Four times what I used to earn as a bus driver,” the independent farmer responded. More money was coming in, and the costs of raising a family in the countryside are lower as well. His new goal for his children: degrees in agricultural science.
“We are wagering,” smiles Rousseff, sitting in her minimalist, art-filled office in the Presidential Palace in Brasília as she recalls that conversation, “that people will be able to stand up on their own feet and walk by themselves.”
Her wager—Brazil’s wager—is on entrepreneurship. The past two decades have been formidable for her country: curbing inflation (by creating the real and pegging it to the U.S. dollar), privatization (notably, the state-owned telecommunication and mining companies) and a commodities boom (soybean and iron ore). Twenty years ago Brazil’s GDP was at $358 billion and ranked 11th in the world; today, at $2.5 trillion, it’s between sixth and eighth, depending on who’s counting. No other BRIC balances democracy and widespread wealth nearly as well. Half of Brazil’s population now occupies the middle class—their output alone surpasses the entire economy of neighboring Argentina. “There has been a shift, a change in the way we are [perceived],” says Rousseff, 64, whose position atop this shift now makes her the third most powerful woman in the world, according to FORBES’ annual rankings.
Brazil has become one of the most entrepreneurial countries in the world,  with one in four adults self-employed in some manner. Small businesses create two out of three jobs in Rousseff’s private sector—Brazil’s unemployment rate is an envious 5.8%—and 49% of entrepreneurs with companies less than 42 months old are women; the global average is 37%. In bustling São Paulo alone, 1.8 million small-business owners ply their trades, wares and ideas.
Technology has been a game changer. According to Nielsen, Brazil had 82.4 million Internet users in the first quarter of 2012 compared with 62.3 million three years earlier. On Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter Brazilians are the second most active social network users behind the U.S. “Technology is democratizing entrepreneurialism,” says Bedy Yang, the founder of Brazilian Innovators, an organization helping young tech entrepreneurs. “There are 200 million people in Brazil and 250 million mobile devices.” The Brazilian-born Yang lives in Silicon Valley and travels each month to her homeland to host monthly meetups. Three years ago you couldn’t find any venture capital, says Yang, as we lurch through the clogged streets of São Paulo. “Now I’m seeing Excel Venture, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia. It’s the formation of a new asset class.”
Rousseff, who took office early last year, has a plan to keep the good times rolling: incentivizing the kind of entrepreneur that Yang cultivates and that her farmer friend embodies. Specifically, lower interest rates, to expand capital; investing in infrastructure; and targeted tax cuts. “In others words,” says Rousseff, “pro-growth bonuses.” This on top of an already robust layer of incentives for entrepreneurs, including retirement benefits and government microloans. “The corner hairdresser, the popcorn salesperson, we also like to help them,” says Rousseff, who es­pouses a program that advances up to $500 to these kinds of small operators.
The public supports her—a June poll put her approval rating at 77%, ahead of her predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at a similar point in his term. Perhaps more critically, so does Brazil’s entrepreneurial community. “Our government has made substantive reforms in recent years,” Eike Batista, Brazil’s top entrepreneur (and the world’s seventh-richest man, with an estimated net worth of $30 billion), tells FORBES, “and Dilma is building a fertile environment for investors. ”
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“I DON’T THINK I HAD A PLAN to be president,” says Rousseff. That’s an understatement: Rousseff’s route to Brazil’s entrepreneur-in-chief is as unconventional as they come.
Rousseff’s father, a Communist exile from Bulgaria, made a good living in real estate and construction. His two daughters attended boarding school, where Dilma studied piano and inhaled books, a habit to this day. (Next up: James Carville’s It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!) “I used to play volleyball,” recalls Rousseff. “My wrist is not that strong, but I could block my opponent.”
In 1964, when Rousseff turned 17, Brazil’s military overthrew the leftist government of João Goulart, the fifth political coup in 20 years. Overnight civil rights gave way to arrests, disappearances and torture. In 1967, unbeknownst to her family, Rousseff took the nom de guerre Estela and joined a radical faction of the Brazilian Socialist Party that preached revolt but settled for robberies and car-bombings.
Her first marriage lasted less than two years, but the second, to activist lawyer Carlos Araujo, a prominent member of the Brazilian Communist Party, would stick for nearly three dec­ades. Araujo and Rousseff joined an activist group responsible for stealing a safe containing $2.5 million to fund political actions. Araujo has said his wife “never took up arms.” (He also has said he didn’t know his wife’s given name until her arrest.) In early 1970 Rousseff was caught in a sting operation. Military officials tortured her for 22 days, sometimes using electric shocks, and she spent the next three years in prison.
By the time Rousseff was released in 1972, she was 20 pounds thinner and physically broken. Undaunted, she traded her radical politics for pragmatism. Rousseff pursued an economics degree, and with Araujo, now parents of a daughter, Paula, supported the Democratic Labor Party, a cooperative movement composed of leftist groups (a decade ago she jumped to the ruling Workers’ Party). As her reputation grew, Rousseff landed state-level positions as Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of Energy before serving as chief of staff for President Lula da Silva, whom she succeeded.
Rousseff rarely discusses her days as a radical and torture victim, nor does she marvel much at her improbable journey from prisoner to president. For her time and country, she says, it’s typical, “the 1968 generation.”
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To see the challenges that Rousseff now faces—and the opportunities within her grasp—it’s instructive to relive a recent trip to Fortaleza, a city with 2.5 million people in northeastern Brazil, taken by Gary Garrabrant, CEO and cofounder of Equity International. (Garrabrant is a big believer in Brazil. His $2 billion private equity firm has half its money in local growth businesses, including homebuilding, commercial real estate, logistics and storage companies.) Rain had washed out the roads, forcing him to rent a four-wheel Jeep, which he navigated over high sand dunes (“no road, no signage”) with the help of a surfer he picked up along the way. He eventually made it to the city, where, he says, “two to three attractive investment opportunities were discovered.” Bad infrastructure; great prospects.
To increase the latter, Rousseff has decided to invest in the former. A short-term dividend of infrastructure spending: It should goose growth, which has slowed to an expected 2% this year, from a white-hot 7.5% in 2010. A medium-term advantage: Brazil will be more ready for its two-pronged coming-out party—the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016. To her credit, though, Rousseff’s strategy centers mostly on long-term projects—her equivalents of the Eisenhower Interstate System—that will encourage entrepreneurial activity for decades.
Physical infrastructure is the most obvious need: As Garrabrant discovered, only 14% of the roads in the world’s fifth-largest country are paved. Of 142 countries surveyed, the World Economic Forum ranks Brazil’s quality of physical infrastructure 104th—behind fellow BRICs China, India and Russia. In August Rousseff announced plans for competitive auctions in which private contractors can bid for projects, such as the right to operate 7,500km of roads and 10,000km of railways. Total expected investment: $66 billion, with nearly half spent in the next five years.
Broadband is next. In Brazil high-speed Internet costs around $27 per month—if you can get it—versus $10 in China. To make the Web more accessible, Rousseff has allocated $500 million per year. Brazil’s mobile telecommunication plumbing needs more help. ­Connection fees are 48 cents per minute, versus an average 6.2 cents a minute in the average developed country, and the service quality is so horrendous that Brazil’s telecom regulator banned three big mobile phone operators from selling new plans in some areas until they improved. To fix the problem, Rousseff is pressuring the four foreign companies that dominate telecommunications to invest more and deliver faster. If they don’t have 4G running by the World Cup, they will face big penalties.
For Rousseff, “infrastructure” also means clearing the way for entrepreneurs to create. Starting a new business in Brazil isn’t easy. According to the World Bank, it takes up to 120 days to incorporate versus 6 in the U.S., with startup costs running ten times what they do in China. Rousseff is pushing to move business-tax payments online, which should curb the need to file with different authorities. This year Rousseff has also tried to boost smaller farmers, like the one she met outside Brasília, providing $8 billion in small, negative-interest loans.
But taxes remain her stickiest issue. “Brazil’s tax system is among the most complex in the world,” says Henry McVey, head of global and macro asset allocation at KKR, the private equity giant. These complications, which involve regional fiefdoms, make it highly difficult for Rousseff to cut Brazil’s onerous payroll tax, which is effectively 70%, across the board. Instead, she’s been content with targeted cuts to make domestic manufacturers more competitive. She’s also expanded a break for young companies with less than $1.8 million in revenues. Ultimately, she tells FORBES, she pines for a VAT-type system. “We have to change the tax structure from a payroll-based to a turnover-based taxation structure,” she says.
For all of her business-friendly policies, Rousseff also stays true to her background in social justice. She doesn’t feel these are mutually exclusive. “If you think the market alone was able to lift 70 million people out of poverty, I mean, you’re wrong,” she says.
In education, Rousseff aims to train more—and better—scientists and engineers. Until now few Brazilians have studied abroad. Last year only 9,000 Brazilians studied in the U.S. (excluding language students), compared with 260,000 from China and India. Under Rousseff’s Science Without Borders program, by 2015 that figure will jump to  100,000 (U.S. schools have already agreed to take 20,000).
Rousseff, now a grandmother, also advocates, via policy, on behalf of children. Every household with a child under age 6 gets $35—on the condition that the kids attend school and abide by a vaccination calendar. When Lula da Silva engineered the stipend in 2003, critics howled “as if we were giving hope to the beggars,” says Rousseff. The harsh truth: “The older you are the more protected you are. Stark poverty in Brazil is female and child.” Rousseff adding her own perks: 6,000 day care centers for lower- to middle-class families and free medicine for kids. Aid to children is funneled to mothers. (“Always the woman,” says Rousseff, “because the man tends to get the money and spend it in alcoholic beverage.”)
Rousseff faces major challenges. All this tax-trimming and social spending raise the prospects of a Brazilian fiscal cliff. Inflation remains a real concern. And corruption still festers nationwide and in the capital: Rousseff has already sacked six ministers and her chief of staff amid various scandals.
For what’s it’s worth, though—about $30 billion, in this case—the man with more personally at stake in Brazil than anyone, Eike Batista, is betting on ­Rousseff: “She is brave enough to carry Brazil ahead.”

Tag: Revolution

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

‘Education Is Freedom’

Why A Hello To The Dalai Lama Costs Billions

The Healing Of Handshakes

THE REAL DEAL