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Mohannad Hesham is an Ashoka Fellow and the founder of Life From Water, which has brought clean water and climate adaptation to more than a million people across Egypt and East Africa since 2011. He is co-founder of Mohandes AI, and trains executives and their teams to put AI to work. He has taught 27,000 learners.

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Mohannad Hesham trains executives and their teams to put AI to work, and builds the tools himself — which is the unusual part, because they are running in real organisations rather than in demonstrations. He founded Life From Water in Egypt in 2011 and still runs it: clean water and climate adaptation reaching more than a million people, measured by randomised trials with J-PAL, Brown and Stanford rather than by claims. He is an Ashoka Fellow and a Perplexity Business Fellow, co-founder of Mohandes AI, and has taught 27,000 learners across published courses and live training in Egypt and the Gulf.

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Mohannad Hesham founded Life From Water in Egypt in 2011, at nineteen, because villages an hour from where he grew up had no drinkable water. The organisation now works across Egypt and East Africa on clean water access, agriculture and climate resilience, and has reached more than a million people. Its work is evaluated rather than asserted: Life From Water has run the field side of randomised trials with J-PAL, Brown University and Stanford, and its pilot of Water is Life for the Sawiris Foundation led to a second phase signed with Schneider Electric. Building software the organisation needed and nobody would build for it — attendance and payroll, a finance desk, then operations software now running at two paying companies — is how the AI work began. Today most of his week goes on teaching and advising organisations on putting AI to work, at Hassan Allam, Halwani Brothers, Wadi Group and stc among others, and the rest is still water. He is an Ashoka Fellow and a Perplexity Business Fellow, co-founder of Mohandes AI, and has taught 27,000 learners. He holds an MBA from Edinburgh Business School and lives in Cairo.