Renewable Energy · Greenly Feature
Most Jordanians have never heard of JREEEF. Nearly one in five of them has benefited from it directly, through a solar water heater, a school with working air conditioning, or a mosque that stopped worrying about its electricity bill.
The Jordan Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Fund doesn't run ad campaigns or put its name on billboards the way a hotel or a restaurant might. It's the executive arm of Jordan's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, financing solar and efficiency projects in homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and farms across the country. In its first decade, that quiet work reached an amount of people most public campaigns never touch.
JREEEF isn't simply handing out free solar panels. Its financing model mixes full grants, partial grants of 10 to 50 percent, and zero-interest revolving loans, structured differently depending on the sector and who's meant to benefit. Over the decade, JREEEF's own contribution of 28.4 million JD, combined with 18.3 million JD from international donors, unlocked 46.7 million JD in total project financing, which in turn mobilized 84.2 million JD in overall investment. The average project pays for itself in 3.2 years, well inside the fund's 7-year benchmark.
None of that happens without the fund's network on the ground: 231 community-based organizations across every governorate, including 53 women-led CBOs, act as the local link between JREEEF and the households actually applying for support.
The household sector is where JREEEF's impact is most tangible, and where it started. Household energy use, mostly heating water, is the single largest slice of a typical Jordanian family's energy bill, and JREEEF built three separate programs to chip away at it.
One detail stands out in how the solar water heater program was structured: it wasn't a single blanket rollout. Different tranches targeted different needs, a fully grant-funded track for households officially classified as low-income under the "Al-Afifa" designation, a partial-grant track run through commercial banks and local organizations, and a targeted track built specifically around rehabilitating dilapidated homes through the Jordanian Engineers Association. The most recent tranche, launched with Italy's Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, is targeting 12,000 more solar water heaters for low-income families, with 5,393 already installed in 2025 alone.
JREEEF's public-sector work is where the numbers start to feel less like statistics and more like infrastructure. Under Jordan's Royal Initiative to heat and cool schools, JREEEF transformed 136 government schools and 2,378 classrooms, reaching nearly 68,000 students and teachers, installing everything from LED lighting to full solar PV systems designed to cover a school's entire electricity consumption.
"This program not only saves energy but also creates a healthy, comfortable classroom environment for students and teachers, making schools living examples of sustainable and innovative educational institutions."
From JREEEF's Decade of Impact report, 2015–2025
The healthcare push went further still. JREEEF installed solar thermal water heating across every single public hospital in Jordan, covering 6,360 beds and roughly two million patients and visitors a year, in partnership with the International Finance Corporation and Italy's Ministry of Environment and Energy Security. A separate solar PV program reached 14 comprehensive health centers on top of that.
Perhaps the most quietly significant number sits with places of worship: 631 mosques and churches now run on solar power, funded through a cost-sharing model where the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs covers a quarter of the cost, JREEEF matches it, and local mosque committees cover the rest. It's a funding structure built around shared ownership rather than a one-way handout, which may be part of why it scaled to over 600 sites.
JREEEF's analysis of its own industrial program produced a finding worth sitting with: energy-efficiency upgrades in factories deliver a faster payback than solar installations, roughly 3 years versus 5 to 7 for solar PV, and nearly half of all efficiency measures pay for themselves in under two years. The fund modeled what would happen if that logic were applied across all 2,193 factories in Jordan, not just the 187 that have gone through a JREEEF-supported energy audit so far: an estimated 194 million JD in annual savings and a potential 27 percent cut in the industrial sector's electricity consumption. Right now, only about 8.2 percent of Jordan's industrial facilities have actually had that audit done.
JREEEF's own evaluation of its industrial program didn't shy away from naming what isn't working. Factories that get an energy audit don't always follow through on the recommendations, held back by limited financing, difficulty accessing the right financing instruments, and a lack of in-house technical expertise. The fund's response has been to push for more flexible financing and deeper technical support rather than treating the audit itself as the finish line.
About JREEEF
The Jordan Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Fund is the executive financing arm of Jordan's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, established under Bylaw No. 49 of 2015. Learn more at JREEEF.memr.gov.jo.