The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

Technology, Rural Development, Environment, Energy

Fabio Rosa has pioneered systems to provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of impoverished rural Brazilians. His widely-replicated Palmares Project established the standard for low-cost electricity transmission in rural Brazil, reducing costs to consumers by more than 90 percent. Today, Rosa is spreading innovative "agro-electric" solutions that combine photo-voltaic solar energy, electric fencing, and improved farming and grazing systems to simultaneously combat poverty, land degradation and global warming.

An agronomist and engineer, Rosa began his work as a secretary of agriculture in Palmares do Sul, a rural municipality in Rio Grande do Sul, in southern Brazil. Rosa found that seventy percent of the rural dwellers in the municipality lacked electricity. Because Brazil's electric distribution systems had been designed under military dictatorships to serve large farms, factories, towns and cities, high transmission costs placed electric service out of the reach of 20 million rural Brazilians, a fact that exacerbated poverty and environmental destruction and intensified rural-to-urban migration. Rosa sought to develop a more cost-effective electric distribution norm. In order to do so, he had to fight for years for permission and cooperation from state governments, electric companies, bankers, mayors, equipment manufacturers and villagers.

The Palmares Project was designed to provide electricity to rural properties for less than 10 percent of the government's cost. The system employed just one wire to distribute electricity to rural properties, and Rosa further lowered costs by substituting materials and using local labor to build the system. The Palmares Project also taught villagers improved rice farming techniques (made possible by cheap electric irrigation pumps), boosting farm incomes by 200 to 400 percent and causing many villagers to return to their land from the city.

Rosa later carried the Palmares Project to tens of thousands of other properties and helped other states implement similar systems. In the 1990s, when the Brazilian government suddenly stopped supporting rural electrification projects, Rosa established a for-profit company and a non-profit institution and, through them, began installing thousands of solar electric systems across Brazil. Today, he is attacking poverty and environmental degradation in delicate grasslands such as the pampas by packaging solar energy with electric fencing and managed grazing techniques, offering poor rural dwellers sustainable, non-destructive livelihoods.

Fabio Rosa was born in 1960 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. His father was a manager in a state-owned bank for 42 years. From him he learned “When money is involved, you get to know a person’s character”. His mother was a primary school teacher and started her career working with the German immigrants in Rio Grande do Sul, trying to integrate them and teach Portuguese. From her he took away that “everything that is worth doing it, is worth doing it well”. Fabio studied agronomy at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. He became Municipal Secretary of Agriculture in Palmares do Sul at the age of 23 in 1983. According to Fabio, "a project only makes sense to me when it proves useful in making people happier and the environment more respected and when it represents a hope for a better future".

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