Sivan Yaari

Origins and early life

Sivan Yaari was born in Israel in 1978 to parents with roots in North Africa, moved with her family to France at the age of twelve, and came back to Israel to do her military service.

Work and career

At twenty she was overseeing quality control at a denim factory in Madagascar, and the weekends she spent in its villages showed her communities living without electricity or clean water. She took a degree in finance at Pace University in New York and a master's in international energy management at Columbia University, completed in 2008, the year she founded Innovation: Africa. The organisation, first called Jewish Heart for Africa, uses Israeli solar technology to pump groundwater to village taps and to light schools and clinics, and by 2026 it had brought electricity and clean water to some six million people in more than 1,400 villages across ten African countries.

Recognition

Its remote monitoring system, which lets donors follow in real time how much water each village pumps, earned it the Innovation Award of the United Nations, and since 2012 it has held special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Asked by Hadassah Magazine in 2019 how Jewish values guide her work, she answered with God's promise to Abraham in Genesis that through his descendants all the families of the earth would be blessed, and the Jewish Women's Archive counts her among the Jewish women social entrepreneurs it profiles.

In 2023 she was one of the torch-lighters at the ceremony opening the celebrations of Israel's seventy-fifth Independence Day, and that September the Jerusalem Post placed her thirty-ninth on its list of the fifty most influential Jews. In 2026 the Young Presidents' Organization named her an honoree of its Global Impact Award, noting that Innovation: Africa had delivered water to more than two hundred villages in 2024 alone.