9 October 2024: Abu Dhabi, UAE: The Zayed Sustainability Prize, the UAE’s pioneering award for innovative solutions to global challenges, has announced this year's finalists following a deliberation by its esteemed Jury.

The winners will be announced at the Zayed Sustainability Prize Awards Ceremony on 14 January 2025 as part of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. The Zayed Sustainability Prize’s Jury elected the 33 finalists from 5,980 entries received across six categories: Health, Food, Energy, Water, Climate Action and Global High Schools.

The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) has been selected among the top candidates for the Zayed Sustainability Prize - Water category. The solutions proposed by the final candidates aim to improve water use efficiency and enhance access to clean drinking water. The finalists for this category included:

• Elman Teknoloji Ltd, an SME from Türkiye that employs sensors to optimise water use in irrigation and agriculture, cutting labour costs by 80%.

• HAF, an NPO from Morocco that provides a solar powered water pumping system to optimise groundwater extraction.

• SkyJuice Foundation Inc., an NPO from Australia that develops low-cost, easy to deploy water filters that provide clean drinking water without the need for chemicals, pumps, or external energy sources.

HAF considers clean water a top priority in its development strategy, impacting health, education, agriculture, and beyond. Access to clean drinking water for every person is essential. Providing access to clean drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene investments helps prevent waterborne diseases.

HAF designs water projects tailored to each community's needs and collaborates with various stakeholders to find solutions using local building practices, transferring necessary technical skills for water system maintenance. Moreover, clean water significantly affects health and well-being in communities. By accessing new water sources, building water containment and delivery systems, we can expand agricultural production in drought-prone areas.

Morocco's agricultural sector is the largest consumer of water resources, surpassing domestic use by far. Factors like persistent drought, the need for water infrastructure and landscape management adaptation, soil degradation, and low rainfall exacerbate the need for well-designed irrigation systems, especially in mountainous regions.

Improved irrigation systems provide a pathway to renew land using traditional farming methods, improving soil quality and expanding production. HAF's efforts focus on innovative solutions to mitigate these challenges by contributing to community empowerment and participatory planning, restructuring irrigation systems, building irrigation basins, storing irrigation water, and enhancing access to potable water.

The winners of the 2025 Zayed Sustainability Prize will be announced at the awards ceremony during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week on January 14, 2025. Each winner in the categories of health, food, energy, water, and climate action will receive one million US dollars, while each winning school from the six Global High Schools will receive up to 150,000 US dollars.