Nawaya is a project led by a team of young “green” Egyptians aiming to develop sustainable, economically prosperous and agriculturally productive eco-projects through enabling citizens to participate in creating their own such projects. Nawaya seeks to harness community skills and build synergies that create viable business models and attractive employment opportunities for youth. Nawaya’s collective of expertise works as a learning network to innovate and apply good practice in the fields of sustainable land-use and agriculture, appropriate technology and educational curricula for rural development. Their working approach has 3 steps: community participation in program design, education and training, and hands-on prototyping. Each step Nawaya takes is validated through community feedback, and their hub for research and innovation seeks to create community-centric, open-source, replicable models. Their approach is innovative in the sense that each step must by validated by the group/the community involved in the local project. "Group processes", "Common agreements", "Collaborative budgeting", "Collective strategy development" all are tools used by Nawaya.

Nawaya is trying to build-up awareness and capacity-building in rural communities through e-learning, creative communication campaigns, and farmer-to-farmer videos. Every three weeks, a workshop takes place focusing on a different aspect of the development of the eco-village (for example, compost is a big topic), targeting rural farmers and urban rooftop farmers. Some specific outputs are the online publication of free and open resources for communities, meant as alternative models farmers can replicate in their home community. Examples of prototypes include: "Running an inclusive rural food festival", "Running an inclusive tour with rural communities", "Launching a rural artisanal food company", "Starting a locally-sourced grocery", etc. In addition, the Nawaya initiative has had several intangible outcomes such as enabling more cooperation and building-up rural representation in Egypt.