Fairtrasa’s founder wins Social Entrepreneur Award
Patrick Struebi with one Fairtrasa's mango growers
The founder and CEO of Fairtrasa is among 37 social entrepreneurs from around the world who have been recognized for their innovative approaches and potential for global impact. The awardees will form part of the broader Schwab Foundation community of Social Entrepreneurs, which includes 250 outstanding social entrepreneurs from 60 countries who are fully integrated into the events and initiatives of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Bananas, avocados and mangoes from empowered small‐scale farmers
Patrick Struebi won the Schwab 2014 Social Entrepreneur award for creating Fairtrasa, a pioneering social enterprise that provides European and US consumers with top quality organic fruit sourced directly from small-scale farmers. Fairtrasa’s fruit come from around 5000 smallholder farmers from Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Colombia.
Through Fairtrasa’s development program, small-scale farmers receive seeds, capital, technical support and access to a global sales network. As a result, thousands of growers are able to increase their incomes, improve their farming skills and receive fairer deals for their produce.
Fruit industry leader
Fairtrasa’s unique social business has made it one of the leading organic and fairtrade fruit providers from Latin America and a multi‐award winning social enterprise.
“The Schwab Social Entrepreneur award is an important honour for Fairtrasa. It not only recognizes our development work for small-scale farmers but also demonstrates the need for innovative and far-reaching solutions on how food is grown, paid for and traded,” says Struebi.
The Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year award is the most recent recognition of Struebi and Fairtrasa’s work in sustainable agriculture. In previous years, Struebi was named “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” in Mexico by Visionaries and two times by the abc* foundation and Univision. He is an Ashoka Fellow, an Endeavor Entrepreneur and a Yale World Fellow.
For more information:
Valerie Remoquillo
Fairtrasa International
Emailt: valerie.remoquillo@fairtrasa.com
www.fairtrasa.com