Founder and CEO, Life From Water, since 2011 · Co-Founder, Mohandes AI, applied AI for industry · Ashoka Fellow for social entrepreneurs, 2024
Mohannad Hesham trains executives and their teams to use AI in their day-to-day work, and builds AI tools, including for his own organisation.
Since 2011 he has led Life From Water, a clean water and climate organisation in Egypt and East Africa whose programmes are independently evaluated.
Training and advisory built around the work a team already does, from an executive briefing to a cohort over several weeks. In Arabic or English.
Clean water and climate programmes since 2011, independently evaluated through randomised trials with J-PAL, Brown and Stanford.
Talks and panels on organisational AI adoption, human judgment in AI use, and AI in development, water and climate.
Life From Water ran the pilot of Water is Life for the Sawiris Foundation. It was evaluated with J-PAL MENA, and on the strength of that result the Foundation and Schneider Electric signed a second phase.
The Foundation calls the second phase a building on the pilot’s outcomes, in its own announcement. What that phase covers is on the evidence page.
The full evidence record →
HAPIE is a policy hub at Egypt’s National Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, led by J-PAL MENA with Community Jameel, pairing government agencies with researchers on air and water problems.
Life From Water signed a memorandum of understanding with it in June 2025, as a formal collaboration.
Research and policy →
The systems he has built include attendance and payroll, a finance desk, operations software for water treatment plants, and an agricultural assistant answering farmers over WhatsApp in their own language.
Ten systems in all, each marked as live, in pilot, or not yet public.
All ten systems →
Recent programmes include safe and useful AI for the IT department at Hassan Allam Properties, applied AI for commercial and operations teams at Wadi Group, and AI literacy across eight functions at Dar Saleh.
Delivered in person across Egypt and the Gulf, or live online.
Training and advisory →Most stall for the same three reasons, and none of them are problems with the tool. His programmes begin with what an organisation is trying to achieve, and which part of that AI can help with.
Answers come only from this website. If the site does not cover something, it says so.
Choose a subject and the email opens with a few questions that help him reply usefully. Formal proposals and concept notes are welcome as attachments. He usually replies within two or three days.
Organisation: Who would take part, and roughly how many: What they do day to day: Preferred timing, and location or online: Language: Arabic, English, or both: