The Varkey Foundation, an international organization dedicated to valuing teachers, recognized Brazilian educator Débora Garofalo as the world’s most influential teacher.

At a ceremony on Monday (Feb. 2) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, held ahead of the Global Teacher Prize, she received the Global Teacher Influencer of the Year award. The honor recognizes her work beyond the classroom.

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“I’m still very emotional. Receiving the Global Teacher Influencer award was indescribable. I felt deeply honored, not only as a teacher, but as a representative of Brazilian education,” she told Agência Brasil.

Débora Garofalo was the first person to receive this award, which was launched this year to recognize a teacher who uses her influence and social media to promote education beyond the classroom.

She believes the award demonstrates the strength of Brazilian education and its potential to innovate with limited resources and a strong desire to change realities.

“This recognition shows that work born in the periphery, within public schools, with creativity, humanity, and social commitment, can conquer the world. This award is not just mine. It belongs to my students, to the community where it was born, and to teachers across the country who transform difficulty into learning every day,” Garofalo added.

In 2019, she became the first Brazilian woman and the first South American finalist for the Global Teacher Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize of education.”

Her nomination for the prize resulted from a robotics teaching project using scrap materials for public school students, developed in the outskirts of São Paulo. In the project, young people aged 6 to 14 learn about motor assembly, circuits, and programming to create their own prototypes.

For her, the international recognition of this work sends a clear message to Brazil: it is always necessary to invest in education.

“Brazil has incredible talents within the classroom, and I hope that this recognition can inspire more investment, greater appreciation, and more hope in the transformative power of education,” she noted.