São Paulo – The consulate of the United Arab Emirates in São Paulo held a dinner on Thursday (12) evening to promote the Zayed Sustainability Prize to local and state Education officials, school representatives and business owners interested in lending financial support to the projects. The prize awards sustainable projects in different areas.
The dinner at the home of Ibrahim Salem Alalawi (in the picture above, leading the presentation), the UAE general consul, had a brief speech by the host, followed by a presentation of the prize’s institutional video, with a step-by-step on how to submit an entry, and the distribution to the guests of booklets with information on each category and flash drives with all the media presented at the event.
“The Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce supported the event by inviting its members, plus the assistance with the event’s promotion, continuing its solid partnership with the consulate,” said Raquel Moss, the consulate’s public relations adviser (in the picture above, to the right of the consul). The Arab Chamber’s president, Rubens Hannun, attended the event. He discussed with the consul other possibilities for the organization to support the initiative.
Also, at the dinner was teacher Viviane Cristina Silva Ramos, from the teaching staff of Professor Dimas Mozart e Silva Public School, in Taquarituba, 330 km from São Paulo, which was among the top three of the Zayed Sustainability Prize in the category Global High Schools in 2017 and 2018. The Biology and Sciences teacher was the supervisor of the project based on the students’ ideas and travelled with them to the prize ceremony in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in both years.
Ramos said that the school will submit an entry again this year for the 2019 edition of the award. The idea is to present again the project from 2018, Our Sustainable School, which includes clean energy from solar panels, cisterns, organic vegetable gardens with a drip irrigation system, exclusive rooms for sustainability workshops with green ceilings, compost heaps, and other items that will be added by the students for this edition of the prize.
We’re convinced that the project can win next year and we’re just so happy that we reached the top three for two consecutive years; it’s wonderful to be able to provide a dream trip like this one, of taking my students to visit Dubai and Abu Dhabi,” said Ramos.
Another esteemed presence was the physicist José Goldemberg, who won the Zayed Future Energy Prize (the former name of the Zayed Sustainability Prize) in 2013 in the category Life Achievement. Goldemberg is 90 years old and continues to work in his field.
About the prize
The Zayed Sustainability Prize is a tribute to the legacy of the late founder of the United Arab Emirates, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, an advocate for environmental stewardship and global sustainability. The prize changed its name for next year, its 10th edition; before, it was called Zayed Future Energy Prize.
The prize has five categories, Health, Food, Energy, Water and Global High Schools – in the latter, there are six awards, one for each region, which are divided as Americas; Europe and Central Asia; Sub-Saharan Africa; East Asia and Pacific; South Asia; and the Middle East and North Africa.
The prize offers USD 3 million to be distributed in equal parts of USD 600,000 to each one of the five categories. In the Global High Schools category, the amount will be divided between six schools, that is, USD 100,000 for each.
The prize ceremony has been scheduled for January 14, 2019, during the Sustainability Week, in Abu Dhabi, UAE. All finalists will be invited to attend.
For further information, visit the event’s website.
Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
