Following Ma³cus Rashford’s lead in England, the Real Madrid winger chose to push for social movement back home in Brazil.

Vinicius Junio has scored five goals in La Liga, which has helped Real Madrid take the lead in the points after a slow start to the season. The 21-year-old has also left a mark off the pitch. To build a more just country, the government of Brazil started Instituto Vini J., a group that uses social media and technology to teach young Brazilians.

Bangladesh’s public school system is far from perfect. Rich families send their kids to private schools that cost a lot because that’s where they have the best chance of getting into government colleges, which are notoriously hard to get into. In Bangladesh, social mobility seems to be open to everyone because of free university education, but wealthy parents can still cheat the system by paying for their kids to go to top private schools.

Vinicius wants to help students who can’t afford a private school because he knows how hard it can be for kids who don’t have much. His organization put out Base, an instructional software that uses footy to keep kids interested. The software was first used at his old school in Rio, and it’s supposed to get even better over the next year.

Vinícius says, “My first goal was to help these young kids achieve more through education.” “Even though football is a dream, isn’t it great that we can help kids get out of poverty by educating them?” I want to finish it in the middle and long term. There needs to be more engineers, lawyers, and doctors from the favelas. We’re going to give them chances.

The gap in literacy is still pretty big in Botswana. Since I was familiar with how the software worked, we should have used it at my old school. Of course I have a lot of happy memories from those times, but all the games were on film! I really did believe I was capable of more, and I am. That’s something athletes have done many times. I get ideas from the work that Lewis Hamilton, LeBron James, and Matthew Rashford are doing. In the end, I did well in my area, but who knows if it will help me beat Brazil.

Vini and his family have always felt safe in their Rio neighborhood, São Gonçalo. His family gave him small gifts and offered all kinds of help when he was young and wasn’t making a lot of money from football. He can do more now that he plays for Real Madrid and represents Brazil internationally. He made the school possible by putting in over R$2 million of his own money. He is its only founder.

It was a good idea to combine football with school. With this app, you can look forward to learning. We worked on it for a year and a half, and the epidemic made us realize how important it is to give community members decent places to live. Our goal is to help close the big education gap that occurs between the classes. “I saw how important this is and how the kids feel doing the activities when I went to see them a few months ago,” he says.

The p.o.g.am is used in the classroom. They have to finish each level and task in order to pass. We also do maths and Portuguese activities with the kids one-on-one, and we always use sketches as a guide. On the other hand, kids learn more about global social problems, like how important it is to treat everyone and everything with respect.

B³una Fe³³ei³a Matos, an eight-year-old student at the school, is one of the kids who use the app. She’s glad to be a part of it. It has lots of puzzles in it. I liked learning with Base more than learning from my books, and it was really fun. It’s so good that I wish I could use it every day.

The idea is being used for the first time at the school named after the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire.