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18 social entrepreneurs, innovators named winners of Schwab Foundation awards
Eighteen social entrepreneurs and innovators from 15 organizations spanning 13 countries were named winners of the Schwab Foundation Awards 2025.
This year’s awardees are transforming healthcare and education, creating livelihoods for economically marginalized communities, and protecting nature.
The 18 social entrepreneurs and innovators are named winners under four categories; namely social entrepreneurs, public social innovators, Collective Social Innovators, and Corporate Social Innovators.
The Social Entrepreneurs include individuals employing innovative, market-based approaches to directly address social issues. This year’s winners under this category are Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CareMessage Cecilia Corral; Christina Mawuse Gyisun – Co-Founder of Sommalife, a social enterprise that addresses the systemic socioeconomic exclusion of women smallholder shea nut farmers in West Africa; Muzalema Mwanza – Founder of Safe Motherhood Alliance, a purpose-driven organization in Zambia that aims to ensure safe childbirth for the 20 million pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa without access to equitable maternal healthcare; Valmir Ortega – Founder of Belterra Agroflorestas, which restores degraded land through agroforestry in Brazil; and Manuel Rosemberg – Chief Executive Officer of ANA Care, which offers an AI-driven platform that provides healthcare training, support and monitoring tools for caregivers throughout Latin America.
The winners of this category also include Aline Sara – Co-Founder of NaTakallam (‘We Speak’ in Arabic), which disrupts the conventional approach to humanitarian aid by enabling refugees and conflict-affected individuals to earn an income online as language tutors, teachers and translators; Akshay Saxena – Co-Founder of Avanti Fellows, a non-profit that aims to provide equitable access to India’s top science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) colleges; and Vineet Singal – Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CareMessage, a US-based technology non-profit building the largest patient engagement platform for low-income populations in the United States.
The Public Social Innovators category included leaders in the public sector who harness the power of social innovation to create public good through policy, regulation, or public initiatives. This year’s winners under this category included Islam Alijaj – Founder and President of Tatkraft, an association of and for people with disabilities who want to manage their everyday lives independently, and actively shape society. Alijaj is a Swiss Albanian disability activist and politician with cerebral palsy, and a member of the Swiss National Parliament since 2023 – after serving on Zurich’s City Council; and Trinh Thi Huong – Deputy Director-General of the Agency for Enterprise Development, Ministry of Planning and Investment of Viet Nam. With over 20 years of policy-making experience, she is now focused on creating an enabling environment for micro, small and medium enterprises, promoting inclusive and sustainable businesses.
The Corporate Social Innovators category also included leaders within multinational or regional companies who drive the development of new products, services, initiatives, or business models that address societal and environmental challenges. This year’s winners under this category included Caitlyn (Juhong) Chen – Vice-President and Head of Sustainable Social Value (SSV) at Tencent, where she drives the company’s mission of “Tech for Good” by harnessing connection and digital innovations to address environmental, healthcare and other sustainable development challenges; Dr. Eric Cioè-Peña – Founder of the Center for Global Health at Northwell Health in New York, leading research and programs to address global health inequities; and Fred Hersch – Senior Product Manager at Google Health, where he leads on Open Health Stack, a collaboration with the World Health Organization offering a suite of open-source components that enable developers to build next-gen, data-driven digital health solutions.
The Collective Social Innovators included people who bring together organizations to solve complex problems that cannot be tackled by individual actors. This year’s winners under this category included Ved Arya – Director of the Buddha Institute and National Convener of the Responsible Coalition for Resilient Communities (RCRC), a collective of 98 grassroots civil society organizations across 15 states in India that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities. Arya’s fellow RCRC leaders and 2025 Schwab Foundation Awardees include Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director of the Population Foundation of India, and Apoorva Oza, Global Lead for Agriculture and Climate at non-profit the Aga Khan Foundation.
The winners of this category also comprised Abraham Baffoe – Technical lead of the Africa Sustainable Commodities Initiative (ASCI), a multistakeholder partnership of ten countries in Central and West Africa, inclusive of governments, companies, local communities and NGOs. ASCI members have defined and committed to principles for producing cocoa, rubber, palm oil and coffee crops in a way that protects forests while improving local smallholder livelihoods.
The winners also included Dr. Madeleine Ballard – Chief Executive Officer of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC), a collective of community health workers (CHWs) and aligned health organizations from 60+ countries. CHIC is making professional CHWs – who are salaried, skilled, supervised and supplied – the norm worldwide by changing guidelines, funding and policy.
In January 2024, the Schwab Foundation’s Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship launched the Rise Ahead Pledge to help unite businesses to enhance the social economy by 2030. Over two dozen world-leading companies have now signed the pledge, and it is estimated the signatories have spent $278 million on corporate social innovation to date.
François Bonnici, Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, said “Our world is grappling with instability, polarization and disenfranchisement while facing extreme, unpredictable weather events and disasters. It is also undergoing a radical transformation with both the green and digital transitions. Although this comes with economic opportunity, it also risks exacerbating existing inequalities or creating new ones. In the face of these significant challenges, the need for bold and innovative solutions has never been more pressing. The work of social entrepreneurs and innovators is not just important, it is essential.”
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