Water and Energy for Food (WE4F) a joint international initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the European Union (EU), 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 (Sida), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
WE4F, through its Regional Innovation Hubs, provides financial support, technical assistance, and investment facilitation to water-food, energy-food, and water-energy-food innovations.
The supported innovations impact smallholder farmers, helping them unlock missing inputs, finance, technology, and markets. By using these innovations, farmers and food companies can enhance their climate resilience and reduce CO2 emissions.
How WE4F 1.0 Worked
The WE4F program capitalized on the learnings from Powering Agriculture: An Energy Grand Challenge for Development (PAEGC) and Securing Water for Food (SWFF) Grand Challenge. The program is focused on environmentally sustainable innovations aiming to improve energy and water efficiency in the agricultural sector.
The WE4F initiative worked with promising innovations that were identified and nurtured during the PAEGC and SWFF to support their next level of scaling. At the same time, the program opened up new calls for innovations within the water-agriculture-food nexus. WE4F incorporated the Regional Innovation Hub (RIH) model used in PAEGC and the Technical Assistance Facility developed under SWFF. By combining these two successful key programmatic elements together, WE4F’s decentralized approach put a stronger focus on improving local framework conditions for innovations and facilitating end-user financing.
WE4F 2.0: Scaling Impact Across MENA
Building on nearly five years of successful implementation, WE4F 2.0 is a four-year programme dedicated to deepening and expanding this work across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The programme aims to increase climate resilience and security of food and water systems in nine countries — Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, and Palestine — by accelerating the sustainable growth of commercially viable innovations.
WE4F 2.0 supports up to 120 innovative companies and scale-ups through tailored technical assistance, milestone-based grants, and investment facilitation. It builds directly on the achievements of WE4F 1.0, which reached around 700,000 end-users, saved 11.7 billion liters of water, generated 3.7 billion kWh of renewable energy for food value chains, avoided 1.45 million tons of CO₂ emissions, and catalyzed over $34.8 million in investments across 60+ companies.
The programme places a stronger emphasis on value chain impact, enabling environment interventions, and a strategic pathway toward establishing a regional impact investment fund. WE4F 2.0 MENA is a joint international initiative supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and is led by Berytech, in partnership with Cewas and Chemonics Egypt.
