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The history of Catarinense School reaches Cox’s Bazar: artificial intelligence at Save the Children accelerates decisions in refugee camps for education and health.
On April 17, 2026, former student and scholarship holder of Catarinense School Nicholas Roberto Drabowski became one of the names behind the use of artificial intelligence at Save the Children International, focusing on accelerating education and health in humanitarian operations.
Graduated in Control and Automation Engineering from UFSC, and now Global Head of AI of the organization, he works from the NGO’s technology center in England and was on a technical visit to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, considered the largest refugee camp in the world.
From the classroom to a global mission
Nicholas recalls waking up at five in the morning, as a boy, to cross Florianópolis by bus and arrive at Catarinense School by seven. Years later, in front of refugee children in one of the most challenging scenarios on the planet, the memory returned strongly with tears of joy, associated with what he describes as the transformative power of education.
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He attributes part of this formation to the school culture focused on a real understanding of the content, with reading, depth, and committed teachers, in addition to experiences of human and Christian formation, which brought students closer to realities of vulnerability and awakened the question that would guide his career: how to use technical knowledge to generate social impact.
Vocation since childhood and the choice for impact
Engineering emerged early, in childhood, when he dismantled toys to understand how they worked. In high school, curiosity turned into a professional path: he passed the entrance exam directly and graduated from UFSC, but with a clear decision not to limit his career to the technical aspect.
In his current job, the use of artificial intelligence appears as part of an effort to make humanitarian assistance more efficient, transforming data into quick decisions in contexts where time, resources, and infrastructure are limited.
Technology in the service of life in education and health
At Save the Children, Nicholas develops solutions to “do more with less,” an essential principle in humanitarian work. Among the uses are digital platforms that help doctors care for children in remote areas, allow monitoring of indicators, and track the impact of programs in real time.
According to the report, the organization measures more than 10,000 quality indicators in its actions around the world, and artificial intelligence serves as a means to organize information, support decision-making, and accelerate responses in the field.
The artificial intelligence that organizes a century of knowledge
One of the innovations led by him was the creation of an artificial intelligence system to organize and make available the knowledge accumulated by the institution over more than a century of humanitarian work.
In practice, the information bank facilitates teams in different countries to access previous experiences, reuse learnings, and adapt already tested solutions to new scenarios, shortening paths and expanding results where each saved step can mean more children served.
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: city scale and extreme challenges
In Cox’s Bazar, Nicholas monitored projects in a camp that houses about 1.1 million refugees, a population comparable to that of a large city, concentrated in an area described as slightly larger than the center of Florianópolis.
With different languages, cultures, and severe difficulties, the scenario demands responses that are low-cost, highly efficient, and strongly locally adapted, especially in education and health. The work, according to the text, also includes thinking about the sustainability of actions, with programs designed to empower local communities and enable governments to turn projects into public policies, expanding the reach to hundreds of thousands of children.
Scholarships, opportunities, and training that returns to society
Nicholas’s journey also highlights the role of scholarships as a tool for access and retention in quality education. Colégio Catarinense maintains programs that seek to ensure a solid academic education combined with human and social training, creating concrete opportunities for integral development.
In the presented reading, stories like his show how, when opportunities exist, knowledge circulates, multiplies, and returns in the form of innovation, care, and responsibility towards others, including through artificial intelligence applied to the common good.
Resilience that crosses continents
Moments experienced in school remain present in professional life, such as the relationship with teachers who did not minimize difficulties but taught how to face them. He cites a significant episode related to mathematics when he understood that challenges are part of the process and that persistence is the way forward.
Between Florianópolis and Bangladesh, the story reinforces the idea that education, when taken seriously, can cross borders and help change realities, even in extreme scenarios, where artificial intelligence becomes a tool to expand reach and accelerate responses.
And for you: how should artificial intelligence be used, as a priority, to improve education and health in extreme situations like that of Cox’s Bazar?
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