From a tutoring job in rural Benin to Beninese citizenship: the story of Sophie Thouvenel

Paris — In 2005, a French engineering student answered a small advert offering tutoring work in rural Benin. There she met a child named Koba, and the meeting changed the course of her life. Twenty years later, Sophie Thouvenel leads a charity working in 14 Beninese cities, has co-produced an award-winning documentary about the country, and, according to her official biography, has been granted Beninese nationality by the President of the Republic.

"The turning point," as her biography puts it, came in that first year. Three years later, in 2008, she founded Hirondelle de l'Avenir ("Swallow of the Future"), and she has run it ever since.

An engineer first

Thouvenel holds a master's degree in environmental engineering from the Institut Francilien d'Ingénierie, completed in 2006. She began her career at WWF and helped set up the Alliance pour la Planète, a French coalition of environmental groups.

Her environmental work took her back to Africa. She investigated the trafficking of waste between France and Africa, and turned that investigation into a documentary she wrote, Le Peuple des Ordures, produced with Presse-Fremantle and sold internationally since 2011.

A model with a mission

Alongside her engineering and charity work, Thouvenel has worked as a professional model since 2004, specialising in luxury lingerie. She has long-running collaborations with Aubade Paris and Cosabella, and has modelled for Hermès, Adidas, Galeries Lafayette, Club Med and Yves Rocher. She now divides her time between France and the United States.

She brings the two worlds together. Several of the brands she has worked with now support her charity's well-being days for women in hardship in Paris, giving beauty care, clothing and glasses to people living in precarious conditions.

A voice for African women

As a speaker, Thouvenel talks about leadership and African women's entrepreneurship, education and inclusion, resilience, the image of women, and documentary film as a tool for change. She has spoken at ESSEC business school, Université Paris Dauphine, the Grand Théâtre de Dakar, in New York, and at the "Femmes & Planète" conference at the Hilton Paris Opéra in 2026.

Her charity's work reflects the same priorities. Its Hirondelles Scholarship has supported about 50 young women through higher education and training since it began, and in 2025 it gave its first business start-up grants to young women, including a 19-year-old seamstress in Allada who used hers to buy an overlock machine.

"We have kept every one of these promises"

In the charity's 2025 annual report, Thouvenel wrote that the organisation had delivered everything it set out to do the year before: a vegetable garden at an orphanage in Sakété that now feeds more than 100 people, themed solidarity trips around Benin's Vodun Days, and more well-being days in France.

"Everything we achieved this year, we owe to you," she wrote to supporters, thanking "our teams in France and in Benin, our volunteers and our partners".

From Benin to New York

In 2025, Thouvenel co-produced Mon Cœur au Bénin ("Benin, My Heart"), a 46-minute documentary directed by the Beninese filmmaker Dyreck Ahounou. It sold out its world premiere at the Majestic Cinéma in Cotonou, won the Audience Award at the FestIFIS festival in Nikki, and is now touring the United States.

She will attend every American screening, including one at the Lycée Français de New York on 27 January 2027, where she will lead a discussion with students on education, women's empowerment and the place of African stories on screen.

For a woman who first arrived in Benin as a student tutor, the country has become, in the words of the film's title, home to her heart.

Source: Sophie Thouvenel's official biography, the Mon Cœur au Bénin press kit and Hirondelle de l'Avenir's 2025 annual report, November 2026.