# Schwab FoundationAwards 2025 In partnership with the Motsepe Foundation. ## Celebrating 18 social entrepreneurs and innovators who are driving systemic change around the world. We are proud to present the 2025 awardees, whose groundbreaking solutions are addressing urgent issues and driving positive change worldwide. These leaders are values-driven entrepreneurs pioneering transformative business, social development and environmental models that are helping build a more equitable and sustainable world. This year’s awardees are addressing health disparities from the United States to Zambia, creating income opportunities for displaced individuals, combatting deforestation in Central and West Africa, and improving the lives of vulnerable communities in India and beyond. ## Social Entrepreneurs Individuals employing innovative, market-based approaches to directly address social issues. ## Cecilia Corral Cecilia Corral is the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CareMessage, a U.S.-based technology non-profit building the largest patient engagement platform for low-income populations in the United States. It aims to improve health equity for 5 million people annually, by 2028. The platform enables organizations to combine messaging, data, and interoperability to increase access to care, improve clinical outcomes, and address social drivers of health. Driven by her experience growing up in a low-income immigrant household, combined with her foundational skills in product design engineering developed while studying at Stanford University, Corral ensures a human-centered approach to CareMessage’s work. Corral is also an advocate for Diversity and Inclusion in the tech industry, collecting and publishing data on Latina Tech Founders. ## Christina Mawuse Gyisun Christina Mawuse Gyisun is the co-founder of Sommalife, a social enterprise that addresses the systemic socio-economic exclusion of women smallholder shea nut farmers in West Africa. Though they supply an essential raw commodity to the $430 billion dollar beauty industry, these women live in poverty, lack access to essential services and are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. Sommalife’s solution is a bespoke tech platform that digitalizes their operations, connects them to markets and enables them to become agents of conservation. Since 2020, the enterprise has connected over 19,000 women farmers to international markets, increasing their income by 23% and protecting more than 1,500 acres of shea trees. Gyisun’s desire to help these women farmers dates back to her childhood, when she witnessed their hardship while working in the market of Kpaguri, Ghana. ## Muzalema Mwanza Muzalema Mwanza is the 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. It strives to safeguard mothers and their newborns during birth in under-resourced clinics or at home by providing baby delivery kits that contain essential medical supplies, community health worker training and a personalized app to connect pregnant women to critical information and resources. To date, the enterprise has distributed more than 51,000 baby delivery kits, trained and equipped 300 birth attendants and assisted 102,500 mothers and newborns. A Mandela Washington Fellow, Obama Leader Africa Fellow and former senior executive at several multinational companies, Mwanza took up the cause of maternal health advocacy after her own challenging childbirth experience. ## Valmir Ortega Valmir Ortega is founder of Belterra Agroflorestas, which restores degraded land through agroforestry in Brazil. The organization partners with farmers to help them grow crops like bananas, cocoa, cassava, papaya and acai berries on land that has been damaged by monoculture planting, deforestation and livestock farming. Alongside these crops, its expert team plants trees, which leads to the creation of productive forests that benefit local people and the environment. Through strategic partnerships, Belterra Agroflorestas has secured commitments to restore more than 40,000 hectares of degraded land across six states in the coming years. Born into a farming family, Ortega has a background in government and environmental conservation research ## Manuel Rosemberg Manuel Rosemberg is the 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. Designed to improve the standards of home-based care, the ANA (Automated Nursing Assistant) platform also helps governments and companies providing professional care services address the critical lack of care workers. The enterprise has already provided support to over 15,000 caregivers in 8 countries. In partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), ANA Care has successfully implemented a pilot program with the Mexico City government to prove the platform's effectiveness, showing the potential to benefit more than 2 million caregivers and their patients nationwide. A serial social entrepreneur, Rosemberg previously founded healthcare company Paz Mental, which quickly became the largest homecare company in Mexico. ## Aline Sara Aline Sara is co-founder of NaTakallam – meaning ‘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. Keen to improve her Arabic and address the acute needs of Syrian refugees in her home country of Lebanon, Sara founded NaTakallam in 2015. Her social enterprise has since enabled forcibly displaced and conflict affected individuals to self-generate nearly US $4 million, connecting them with 16,000+ learners and hundreds of organizations and academic institutions worldwide. Language lessons and translation services are provided in seven Arabic dialects, Armenian, English, French, Kurdish, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. The enterprise also hosts cultural exchange sessions. A Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellow, MIT Solver and a Halcyon Fellow, Sara has a background in journalism. ## Akshay Saxena Akshay Saxena is the 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. To help students from low-income families lift themselves out of poverty through access to quality careers, the organization runs a free test preparation program for over 77,000 school pupils across 29 states and union territories. Nearly 70% end up in higher technical education and 18% go to India’s top 5% of STEM institutions. A Chemical Engineering graduate, Saxena won the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2023. Formerly, he was a founding team member of a medical diagnostics company, HeartFlow. ## Vineet Singal Vineet Singal is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of CareMessage, a U.S.-based technology non-profit building the largest patient engagement platform for low-income populations in the United States. It aims to improve health equity for 5 million people annually, by 2028. The platform enables organizations to combine messaging, data, and interoperability to increase access to care, improve clinical outcomes, and address social drivers of health. Singal’s passion for improving healthcare access stems from his own personal health challenges and volunteering at safety-net clinics as a pre-med student at Stanford University. An Echoing Green Fellow, a DRK Foundation Fellow and a Y Combinator alumnus, Singal has also led a campaign to register 115,000 bone-marrow donors from under-represented communities. ## Corporate Social Innovators Leaders within multinational or regional companies who drive the development of new products, services, initiatives, or business models that address societal and environmental challenges. ## Caitlyn (Juhong) Chen Caitlyn (Juhong) Chen is VP and Head of Sustainable Social Value (SSV) at Tencent, where she drives the company’s mission of “Tech for Good” by harnessing connectivity and digital innovations to address environmental, healthcare and other sustainable development challenges. Under her leadership, Tencent SSV has launched a wide range of social impact projects including digital healthcare screening programs for low-income communities, social innovation partnerships, incubator programs for emerging low-carbon technologies, and emergency response systems for earthquake warnings and pre-hospital care. Her team also operates a charity fundraising platform that has reshaped the philanthropic landscape in China, enabling easy, fingertip donations to over 130,000 charity projects. ## Eric Cioè-Peña Dr. Eric Cioè-Peña, MD, MPH, is the founder and Vice President of the Center for Global Health at Northwell Health in New York, USA. Northwell Health, a leading private healthcare provider, supports the Center’s mission to address global health inequities through innovative research and programs. The Center focuses on improving access to effective surgical care, mental health services, and developing strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations worldwide. Dr. Cioè-Peña also serves as the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) lead ambassador to El Salvador and has extensive experience in health systems development, trauma care, and humanitarian assistance across Ecuador, Guyana, India, Ukraine, Botswana, the Dominican Republic, and other regions. ## Fred Hersch Fred Hersch is a Senior Product Manager at Google Health, where he leads on Open Health Stack (OHS), a collaboration with the World Health Organization. With the aim of addressing health equity gaps, it offers a suite of open-source components that enable developers to build next-gen, data-driven digital health solutions. An estimated 10 million people are supported by health workers using tools powered by OHS. Hersch is an Australian medical doctor now based in Singapore with training in business information technology. A pioneer in digital health, he developed one of the world’s first web-based telemedicine platforms, called Medgnosis with the non-profit, MedTech Outreach Australia, which he co-founded and led from 2002 to 2006. He was also Chief Medical and Product Officer for Telenor Health in Bangladesh, and a James Martin Fellow in Healthcare Innovation at Oxford University, UK. ## Collective Social Innovators People who bring together organisations to solve complex problems that cannot be tackled by individual actors. ## Ved Arya, Poonam Muttreja and Apoorva Oza / RCRC Ved Arya is the director of Buddha Institute and National Convener of the Responsible Coalition for Resilient Communities (RCRC), a collective of 98 grassroots civil society organisations across 15 states in India that formed during the Covid-19 pandemic due to its disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities. To give 16 million marginalised people better access to healthcare, education and economic opportunities, RCRC now acts as a platform for community groups and NGOs to engage with stakeholders – like governments, companies and academics. Arya’s fellow RCC leaders and Schwab Foundation awardees include Poonam Muttreja, the Executive Director of the Population Foundation of India, and Apoorva Oza, the Global Lead for Agriculture and Climate at non-profit the Aga Khan Foundation. ## Abraham Baffoe / Africa Sustainable Commodities Initiative Abraham Baffoe is the technical lead of the Africa Sustainable Commodities Initiative (ASCI), a multi-stakeholder partnership of ten countries in Central and West Africa, which account for 25% of the world’s tropical forest and 75% of Africa’s forests, 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. Baffoe is also the Executive Director for Africa of Proforest, a non-profit dedicated to responsible production of agricultural and forest commodities globally. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Tropical Forest Alliance and the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Stakeholder Council. ## Madeleine Ballard / Community Health Impact Coalition Dr. Madeleine Ballard is Chief Executive Officer of Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC), a collective of community health workers (CHWs) and aligned health organisations from 60+ countries. CHIC is making professional CHWs - who are salaried, skilled, supervised and supplied - the norm worldwide by changing guidelines, funding and policy. Around the world, CHWs bring primary healthcare to their neighbours’ doorsteps. But millions are unsupervised, unequipped and unpaid. CHIC is changing that, ensuring quality care for all, including those who provide it. Dr. Ballard is a Rhodes Scholar, and recipient of the Roux Prize and the Harvard Women’s Leadership Award. She is also on faculty at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. ## Public Social Innovators Leaders in the public sector who harness the power of social innovation to create public good through policy, regulation, or public initiatives. ## Islam Alijaj Islam Alijaj is the 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. He is a Swiss Albanian disability activist and politician with cerebral palsy, and has been a member of the Swiss National Parliament since 2023 – after serving on Zurich’s city council. Alijaj attended a school for pupils with special needs and undertook a commercial apprenticeship, before going to business school. In January 2025, he launched Monitoris AG, a tech-startup that strives to empower professionals by automating administrative tasks so they can focus on delivering value, growing relationships and innovating. ## Trinh Thi Huong Trinh Thi Huong is Deputy Director General of the Agency for Enterprise Development at the Ministry of Planning and Investment of Vietnam. With over 20 years of policymaking experience, she is now focused on creating an enabling environment for micro, small and medium enterprises. She is in charge of facilitating business investment, private sector development and international cooperation. To date, she has contributed to many pioneering policy initiatives, particularly with regards to the promotion of women entrepreneurship; inclusive and sustainable businesses; digital transformation; and the innovation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards for small businesses.