The Water and Energy for Food (WE4F) is pleased to announce the seven winners of the Open Calls for Innovations. The awardees will be supported by the program’s Regional Innovation Hubs (RIH) in the Middle East and North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Southern and Central Africa. Each innovator will receive a customized support package that may contain a grant, technical assistance, investment facilitation, and enabling environment support. Through these support packages, innovators will further grow their businesses, increasing their impact across key themes that impact smallholder farmers’ livelihoods: poverty reduction, food production, water and energy savings, biodiversity and environmental protection, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. 

The Middle East and North Africa RIH innovators are: 

• Ainda Agricultural Center (Iraq) – provides farmers with professionally designed smart poultry farming systems that are connected to mobile applications through sensory systems for automatic monitoring and regulation.
• Mozna (Egypt) – produces liquid organic fertilizers that are derived from biogas units fueled by agricultural waste.

The South and Southeast Asia RIH innovations are:

• CoolCrop Technologies (India) – provides cold storage as well as comprehensive education and training for technology literacy, helping farmers efficiently preserve, manage, and market their harvests.
• HUSK Ventures (Cambodia) –  produces renewable energy and biochar from rice husks, they also focus on empowering women farmers and promoting soil health practices.

The Southern and Central Africa RIH are:

• Bwando Farms (Zambia) – is a vegetable and pig farm that produces organic fertilizer from pig manure and trains communities on sustainable agriculture practices.
• PKT and Partners Group (Democratic Republic of Congo) – manufactures charcoal briquettes and organic fertilizer from biodegradable waste. 
• Tivwane Money Solutions (Zambia) – provides financial services to small businesses and small-scale farmers in rural areas in Zambia, with a specific focus on solar water pumps and agricultural inputs.

The Open Call for Innovations is an activity under Water and Energy for Food: A Grand Challenge for Development (WE4F). WE4F is an international partnership amongst the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Union, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of the Netherlands, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), Sweden through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). WE4F aims to increase food production, impact poverty, and promote biodiversity, climate, and environmental resilience by sustainably scaling solutions to meet the challenges in the water-energy-food nexus. 

The Middle East and North Africa RIH is a consortium of Berytech, cewas, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), and Chemonics Egypt; South and Southeast Asia RIH is a consortium of Tetra Tech, DevWorks International, and CrossBoundary; and the Southern and Central Africa RIH is a consortium of Tetra Tech, Open Capital Advisors, and IWMI.