Matt Damon & Gary White: How to Measure the Worth of Water

Published Mar 31, 2022, 4:00 AM

More than 770 million people around the world are living without access to clean water—including in communities throughout the United States.  The challenges this creates to public health, economic opportunity, education, and gender equality are astounding, and the crisis of water inequity is only growing more urgent due to the effects of climate change.  

In this episode, President Clinton is joined by an unlikely pair who are working together to bring access to life’s most fundamental resource a reality for everyone across the globe—actor and Academy Award winner Matt Damon, and water and sanitation engineer Gary White.  After meeting at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting more than a decade ago, they partnered to found the organization Water.org, and later WaterEquity, and have now brought clean water to more than 40 million people in 11 countries.  In their conversation with President Clinton, they discuss their new book The Worth of Water, explain the urgency of the water crisis and why they’re both so passionate about it, and outline a roadmap to how solving this problem is possible within our lifetimes.

As inconceivable as it may seem to many of us. Today, there are seven hundred and seventy one million people around the world living without access to safe, clean water. That's more than twice the population of the United States, are about one in ten people on our planet, and this isn't just an issue in the developing world. It's also a crisis here in America, where people in communities like Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, have learned in recent years that the water they used to cook, drink, and bathe is toxic. Beyond the obvious health impacts, the challenges this presents around economic opportunity, education, and gender equality are astounding, and the reality of climate change only makes the question of water equity more dawning. So why am I telling you this? Because humanity can't truly solve the challenges or seize the opportunities in front of us unless all of us have safe access to the life's most fundamental resource. Today, I'm glad to be joined by two people determined to make that a reality, and I was fortunate enough to be present for the first meeting over a decade ago between this unlikely pair who together have helped to transform millions of lives. At the Clinton Global Initiative in two thousand and eight, Matt Damon, actor, producer and screenwriter who channeled his fashion for water security and did the charity H two oh Africa, bonded with Gary White, a water and sanitation engineer with years of on the ground expertise. Before long, they had merged their efforts into what came to be called water dot Org. They later started a second organization, of Water Equity, and together they've helped more than forty three million people gain access to clean water. Their new book, The Worth of Water chronicles their efforts and outlines how solving the water crisis is possible within our lifetimes. Matt, Gary, thanks so much for being here today. Thank you for having us appreciate it. As I said, I was there for your first meeting at the Clinton Global Initiative in two thousand and eight. Since then, you have helped transform the lives of more than forty million people around the world through safe water and sanitation. UH for each of you, what led you to focus on water and what makes your partnership effective? Well, I can jump in first and again thanks for for having us here, President Clinton, and for you know, elevating this cause among all the many listeners of your podcast. I think for me, uh, you know, I I got drawn to water when I was still an undergrad in civil engineering, and I found that I also had this drive. It was instilled in me by my parents to kind of get back to the world. And for me, this was the perfect intersection of what I thought was one of the world's greatest needs and what I saw is my passion and that's what really led me into this. And I think that the reason is that beyond that is that, you know, it is just unconscionable that we should have come so far as a planet and as society. Uh, and yet there's still seven one million of us who can't take that safe drink of water every day. And for us, we take it for granted. For them, it's a matter of life and death, and it robs them of not just their health, and sometimes it robs them of their children and the lives three thousand children whose lives will be lost this year because of unsafe water. It also keeps girls out of school because they're fetching water hours each day. It also really is coming home to roost and form of climate people who have the most tenuous access to water right now, some of the people were trying to help are the ones who are going to lose it because of the droughts that are coming and they are already being experienced. We see climate refugees and talk about that regularly now, but we're really talking about is water refugees, because that's what's driving people to move. So it just cuts across so many different facets of economic development. And that's what, you know, really drew me into this. Yeah, for me, I, I I just was astonished when I started looking at some of these issues of extreme poverty, how water underpinned all of them, you know, And I just felt so I couldn't believe it, as you know, as somebody who grew up with as as as as most of us do with with such access and water is in such abundance, we can get a clean drink of water in the kitchen and the bathroom anywhere. Um. I, I just couldn't believe the extent to which it affected the lives of so many people. And and there's another thing that you know, besides the senseless death and the needless death, and and you know, three d thousand kids under the age of five every year. They're The very first person who opened my eyes to this was a girl that I went on my first water collection with in Zambia and about fifteen years ago, and I was waiting for it. She came home from school and we walked together to this well, which is about a mile away from her from her home and and in the course of this, it was just she and I and an interpreter, and I kind of started asking her questions about her life and came to find out you know, I said, well, what do you do you want to live here the rest of your life. We're in a very rural area in Zambia, you know, in a village. And she looked at me said no, I'm not gonna live here. I'm gonna she said, I'm going to the big city. I'm going to Lusaka and I'm gonna be a nurse. And I there was some about the way she said it. I I just it reminded me of being fourteen and saying Ben Affleck and I are going to the big city of New York and we're going to be actors, and like that's what a fourteen year old should be doing, right, they should be looking at the potential of their life and and and thinking about these dreams and trying to figure out how to live them out. And it wasn't until I left and was driving away because I had a really nice connection with this kid, and and as I drove away, it hit me, you know, had someone not had the foresight to sink the boorwell, you know, a mile from her house, we wouldn't have been having that conversation because she wouldn't be in school. She would be spending her entire day, you know, trying to fetch water, trying to collect water for her family, and she would have no hope or no no, no dream of someday contributing to the economic engine of Zambia, of her country, and making a life for herself and helping other people and contributing to the community and all of those things. So there's that other piece of it, which is the opportunity cost and what we lose as human beings when when people's ability to achieve what they can achieve and live out their their to their full potential, um when they're not able to realize that and that, the damage to all of us is really incalculable. I remember when the government of Columbia was given a lot of aid to help move people away from narco trafficking. They had some infrastructure money, and uh, they went out and consulted with people, and they wanted me to belong to the people of Columbia again. The first thing the people in the Forest neighborhood asked for was escalators, because the women were having to walk down and up the equivalent of almost thirty floors every day, very steep incline, with these heavy jugs full of water when they were going back up on their heads. And uh, it's now a big national tourist attraction in Columbia. You know. I would met people from ten or twelve countries on the escalators today that I went there. But all they could think about was we didn't bargain for that. We just wanted these women not to have to spend their lives going up and down the hill to get water. I mean, it's a people don't think about it, and it's important. So you finally decided to write a book about this, The Worth of Water. I'm curious. I want to ask a personal question first. I find writting books is hard, hard work, and it's also introspective. If you're gonna be honest, you gotta ask yourself what you care about. So is there anything to both of you that you learned about your own work or yourself during the process. Well, I found it relatively easy because normally I have to write with Ben Affleck, and this time it was just writing with Gary. So it was that was it was much much smoother process. But we we really when we talked about it, we said, well, we want this to feel like is like you're in the back of the jeep with us somewhere in India and we're driving between site visits and we're just having a free wheeling conversation about how we got here and what happened and all the all the mistakes we made and the failures. But then the success is because for us, it's another way to get this word out, you know, when you can't. You you were nice enough to come to an event of ours ten years ago in twelve We hadn't we hadn't hit a million people yet that we've reached. But you looked at what we were doing and you got it. You got it faster than anybody, and you said and you took us aside and you said, just run it up, run the numbers up, make it undeniable, because if we could, if we can prove this model, which we because it started as a hypothesis of Gary's um but the idea that these women, just one after another, millions of them are paying back these loans at over, it's just the most heroic thing. It's the most beautiful thing. And it's and it just proves what we believed, which was that if if we just nudge a market towards them and get out of the way and let them solve their own problems, they will do it. And and that's really and so they're really at the center of this of this story. Um But but the numbers that you say, now it's forty three point seven million people this month, that that that's where we were at, and it's gonna be fifty million people by the end of this year, which is just staggering because that's in the ten years since we since you came to that event. Um So it's really accelerating and and and that's something that's exciting, and that's what we want to we that's the word we want to get out there because if there's one thing Americans respond to and they've pulled on this. It doesn't matter where you are in the political spectrum. If an idea works, we like it, you know, so and this is an idea that works, uh, And so you know that's we're we're just trying to find different ways to engage people and let them hear the story. It is us this time trying to relate the story of someone else, and that is you know, that representative woman, you know, who represents literally billions that don't have access to water and sanitation. So we have two jobs here. One is to like go out and always be innovating the next thing that's going to get more people of water more efficiently. And the other is like telling the story so that we can mobilize people to this work and and engage them in the stories of these women that we tell in the book. More after this tell us a little bit about the water credit and if one of the things that the world has learned that I wish we'd act more on is that poor people are a good credit risk if they appreciated when somebody helps them and they feel a strong moral responsibility to pay the money. By Gramin bank proved in Bangladesh, brack proved at all the great micro credit experiments. But if you give the credit for something people really have to have, like water, you even get higher rates of return. But tell us how it works. Well, I'll say, because Gary doesn't brag a lot. But this this came from an inside of his which was spending all his time in these communities. He realized that that people were paying for water. In many cases, they were paying up to of their income for water uh usually off the back of a truck or some other system that or by going and using their time and going and standing at a community UH source and spending three hours there and and taking time away from a paying job to do it. And so he looked at what Mohammed units did and said, well, what if we what if we repurposed that and you know, to to to the water sect. Why wouldn't that work because and there was a lot of resistance at the beginning because it wasn't an income generating loan, and that's what the whole thing was built on. And so the the the m f I s went, We'll wait a minute, this doesn't how how am I going to get my money back? And and what we found was that because we're actually buying somebody's time time back. It's what we would call an income enhancing loan. Right, they're able to suddenly if you give them a two hundred dollar loan and you connect them directly to the infrastructure that's already piping water right under their feet, they're just not connected to it. If you if you pay that connection, now, suddenly they have all this extra time to work. They pay the loan off really easily. They end up with a very small water tariff that's negligible compared to what they were paying per month for water. So it was it was a hypothesis that Gary had based in his experience, and but it was a thought leap for the micro finance institutions um and one that we eventually when once we proved it enough, they started to take with us. And that was the time when you said to us, so this is gonna work, This is really gonna work. Yeah, and and to me, this whole concept. You know, before this, we were kind of going along with the traditional approach, raising money, drilling wells and helping communities get water. It was fine, but it certainly wasn't you know, going to solve this in a big way, and during that process, talking to so many women in these communities and just listening to what their stories were about how they were getting their water, how much time they were spending. Talking to one woman uh who described a loan she took out from a loan shark so she could build a toilet. And this was a big epiphany for me because she told me what she was paying a loan shark to get the payment for the toilet. And I did the numbers and it was a hundred and twenty five percent interest that she was paying on that loan because microfinance institutions wouldn't lend for this because, as Matt said, they see it as too risky. And that's where we came in and using her insight and the stories of other women who are walking to get water, and say, okay, let's help these microfinance institutions build a new engine, right and that engine is around water and sanitation. And we would take the risk. If these loans didn't take back to get paid back, we would make them good because we knew it would work well. We thought's very strongly worked because of our research. But then it happened, you know, we got them to come on board. And now there's you know, well over a hundred of these institutions around the world providing these loans. And again it all traces back to sitting down and listening to the people who this problem affects the most, because that's where the solution is really going to come from. And how many countries are you making these loans available now? So we're in over twenty countries now. And if you bring in water Equity, which is the asset manager that we didn't launched, it's it's even north of that, so uh Asia, uh Africa, Latin America. So we're everywhere where people are needing access to water right now. So what does water Equity do? Well, you'll like this. This is so also if we if you had told us ten years ago that we would be doing some deep dive on finance, I would have said, now what are you talking about? But this is kind of where this journey led us, which was we were in India, was it seven or eight years ago? Maybe? Yeah, and we were we were on this trip and we were going and meeting with all these different m f I partners of ours and informally independently polling them saying Hey, what what's your biggest bottleneck here? And what And every single one of them came back with access to affordable capital. So we built basically an asset manager with a lot of help from you know, a lot of a lot of technical expertise from from people. But um, but the idea is that we can give you a return, uh a good like a competitive return, but also do this incredible good with with the investment. Right, We're gonna serve a quantifiable number of people and get them access to clean water and sanitation, um and give you, um, you know, a competitive return on an investment. So so that's uh so that's what that's water equity. So let's let's him um hearing about this the first time. And I bought your book because I like the Jason Bourne movies and I'm blown away. But and I want to make a difference. But I'm just the work and stuff and I can maybe send you two hundred fifty bucks. What would you do with the two d fifty contribution? Well, first of all, that's a lot of money, and especially given that because these loans all get paid back the way they do, it drives down the philanthropic philanthropic cost the capital per person reached. So in a traditional well drilling program, it costs about twenty five dollars to give somebody uh clean water for life. With our programs that we're down below five dollars per person reached. So a two d fifty dollar loan is you know, it's fifty people you're talking about. Uh if I did the math right, I'm not sure, but but but it's it's it's a it's an incredibly significant amount of money to us. So there's no a five dollar loan. If you wanted to just on a one to one help one know the you helped one person achieve access, you should send us five bucks to water dot org and that's what it would do, and you would make the loans directly. So we're not we're not doing it directly. But what we can do with that that two or fifty dollar donation is translated into more of these partners around the world. So we would use that money to go out and help new partners discover this as a good thing to add to their lending portfolio, doing that de risking. We'd use that money to help get them training to help them design the different types of water solutions. To help them, you know, sort through the different types of water systems that would be right for different parts of the world and for different families. So we would kind of, you know, the way I think of it as continuing to further build this engine that is allowing people to get these loans so that water equity can be the fuel that comes in and invest those large chunks of capital to then break that into millions of micro loans so people get water, and then those investors in water equity then get that competitive financial return. So we're trying to come at this and meet people where they are, to that person who can donate five dollars and we can translate that into more women getting loans, to you know, high net worth individuals who invest in US more with a million dollars or multimillion dollar investments, and corporations who come at it because they want to be good water stewards where they're operating and they want to get E s G benefit as well. Tell our listeners. I fancy myself that I still have listeners that just talk flying English and don't know everything. What does SD mean? So that environment, social and governance and it's basically what corporations are seeing as really important if they want to keep customers, if they want to retain particularly younger employees. They want corporations to be not just making a product and selling it and see the stock price go up. They want to see what is this company doing in terms of the environment, what are they doing in terms of social issues right, what are they doing in terms of good corporate governance. So it's the right things to do as a corporate citizen, but it also is increasingly hitting their bottom line if they're not paying attention to some of these broader issues other than just making profits. It's a great example of how stakeholder capitalism works better than shareholder capitalism. If you will make an investment that last five years or more. And I remember, you know, I'm so old now that when I was in law school in the early seventies, that's the way they still taught corporate law, that if you got a charter from the government, you had a responsibility to your employees, your customers, your shareholders, and the communities of which you were as well as your suppliers. And you know, there was mutual obligation here. And then all of a sudden, starting in late seventies, and early eighties, there was this the only thing that really matters as a shareholder profits price, and your job is to maximize profit and over the long run that will do the most social good, which is we now know it's simply not true and it's not even the best economics over any time frame that matters five years or longer. And uh, if you think about it, whatever your business you're in, you want to know that you have customers that have enough health because of water that they can be customers and other things. If you if your water starved, is not a lot of other things you're gonna buy. But anyway, I think this is really exciting because if we all thought that way, we would dramatically accelerate the pace at which we're handling climate change. I think if if this system you've set up is either in existence or is copied everywhere, we have a much better chance of getting through the worst of the climate change problem while we're making this great transition. So it's not just about water, it's about climate change, it's about economic security, and I suspect you were talking about the young woman in Zambia. It's also about education. You think about how many children who even now after all these years and all we know still aren't in school, partly because their parents need him to stay home to make ends meet and meet basic needs like go get the water every day. You know, it just gets back to what maps I'm saying earlier too, is this It's the foundation of so many things, and it affects, can affect positively so many things. And just to pick up on the climate change aspect that you're you're referencing, we know that the people that we strive to serve, you know, some of the worst in the world. They are going to bear the greatest burden of climate change and they have the least to do with creating the problem. And so what we are looking at with with our programs is that resilience that they'll need in the face of droughts hitting their water resources. You know, we don't want to backslide at a minimum as this happens. We don't want to create more climate slash water refugees in the world. Um But then also what we see is the mitigation side of this one of the things that we don't talk about quite as much. It's a little bit more technical, but it's the fact that water has an immense carbon footprint. Right you look at you know, a state like California, of all the electricity goes to sourcing water, pumping it, treating it, and distributing it. And so what we see is this huge carbon footprint around the world and in countries where we work, where sometimes half of the water is lost through poor infrastructures leaky pipes. Now, all of a sudden, you've got a massive carbon footprint of which sometimes provides no economic benefit whatsoever. And so what we're looking at with water equity in particulars how do we invest in some of these utilities and infrastructure so that they drive more supply to people in the poorest neighborhoods, but so they also can reduce their carbon footprint in their greenhouse gases. We'll be right back. Did you start working on also providing toilets immediately or did you get into it? And if so, hell it was it was just water at first, but then you do. You know, as we're just saying, all these problems are so interconnected. When you look at sanitation and you see the fact that when you know, so many countries around the world have zero treatment of their sewage. Right, so where does that go it just goes into these open channels, that goes into these open streams, and ultimately it's going to contaminate the water sources that are there, as well as direct health impacts of children literally playing in some of these same ditches. And so for sure, we we saw this as something that we should be addressing to. And what we also discovered was there was a huge demand for this for micro loans. In fact, in in some countries there's more loans that are happening for toilets than for for water, and there's a number of reasons for that. One is the convenience. You know that you have a facility right there, you don't have to go some distance and sometimes you have to pay to use a toilet in some of the slumps, So there's that economic benefit as well. But it's also just a sense of privacy, uh in modesty, you know, for women who would otherwise not literally not defecate all day until the cover of night to go out and and do at now they're taking out incredible numbers of loans so that they have better health because of that, and they have better access to privacy, and that's what they value. But I think it's safe to say we didn't anticipate the level to which that our borrow our borrowers brought us along on that, right, that was something that we learned from them, and also again that they would would and could pay back the loans. But it's but it's very common for somebody to take the first loan for the water connection and pay that back and then immediately turn around and take out another loan for for a toilet. And you think you'll be a fifty million borrowers by the end of the year, Yes, with more to come, with many more to come, and and and hopefully if and faster, depending on how many people jump on board and get involved, and how much capital we can get into the system. And um, but we're we're you know, our mission is was to was to put ourselves out of business. Right. So it's a big problem, and it's a complicated problem. But but this is this is where we're making a lot of progress. Yeah, it's and it's the systems change, you know that we're really trying to bring about. I mean, with that the money that we've raised through water equity so far, two hundred million dollars, I mean, that is capital that is providing a competitive financial return, right, So it's it's it's moving beyond charity and really literally tapping the global capital markets. Institutional investors are coming into the funds now because there are competitive returns. And so if we can just create this financial plumbing between the global capital markets and that woman making two dollars a day and everybody wins, guess what, we can step back because it will have actually changed the system. And that's that's what we're trying to get towards. Well, you know, in two when we talked about this and I told you to run the numbers up. The reason I was so excited is I spent a lifetime that I love in politics, and I think I was able to do a lot of good in a lot of ways. But I noticed that most of the arguments and most of the press coverage of what we did in politics was about what are you gonna do and how much are you going to spend on it, and not nearly as much about how are you going to do it? And the thing that when I was so excited more than a decade ago seeing what you guys were producing, I thought you had a chance to answer the how question, and I think the how questions are the most important questions of the century. I also believe Matt's right. I think that may be the way to try to end some of this dreadful division and the meaning of each other that we're doing all the time. Now. I think, you know, if you know that you can help somebody and feel better about yourself and in the process help your kids have a broader future, you answer this how question in a way that my it's life fulfilling. So when you walked out of University Garywood, your shouting new civil engineering degree, did you know you were going to do this? I did? I did. I had the good fortune of organizing some student trips to Guatemala and then the Philippines UH to volunteer, and that just cemented it for me. And I didn't know. You know, I may have done another degree in business as their finance instead of three engineering degrees to get here, But I've learned along the way and and I'm just I'm just yeah, I can't imagine doing anything else. And Matt, when you were dreaming of a career in the movies, did you know when you were young that if you succeeded, this would be a part of it, not this specific thing, but that you had to have another mission. Yeah, that was that was something instilled in me really by my by my mother. Um. She took me at he as a teenager, traveling to to Mexico, but to Guatemala and rural rural areas there where I saw things that I had never seen before, and extreme poverty, of political repression, you know, social injustice, all these kind of things. And it gave me such a better context for my own life in the world. Um and and and and lit a fire in me to say, okay, well, you know, as as as as laser focused as I was in my twenties on trying to carve out a career in Hollywood, which is not a not an easy one too, not an easy ring to go after. Um, I knew that if things went well, I wanted to I wanted to return to this because I wanted it to be a significant part of my life. Because Gary and I talked about all the time, you know, what is a life right it's in you know, and how much of it is in service to this kind of greater project and and um, you know, what's what's a life worth living? So um, so those were all things I that we're in the back of my mind as I was as I was kind of slugging it out and trying to trying to build a career. In Hollywood. We tend to almost sanctify the people that we admire for doing things like this. But it strikes me that you guys have had a good time doing this. It's been fun for you because it's doing the right thing makes you feel better, and also that it's working. It gets exciting when when things are going so well. There's Thomas Addison quote, I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun. And certainly there are there are high points and low points in this, but I think it's you know, if you really find your passion and it is in service to people, for sure. But you know, I couldn't do this if it was just drilling one more well. It's the challenge of the entrepreneurial part of me to kind of always be tinkering and experimenting and doing it different and to you know, what I call matching the scale of the solution to the scale of the problem. And you know, charity and the way we were going, you know, it wasn't matched to the scale of the problem. And I think that entrepreneurial spirit just goes from beginning to end. I want to just tell one story about an entrepreneur I met, and her name was Mom of Florence. That's the name she introduced herself to me as when I was in Uganda to visit with her. She had taken out a two seventy five alone to put a pump in a water tank at her house, and she of course then had water for her children and grandchildren that was safe to drink. But then she used the water to grow a garden and so then they had vegetables. Then they would feed some of those too, some pigs that they then got and they would water the pigs and then sell the pigs. And then she had clay soil around her, so she used the water to start making bricks and she would sell the bricks. Then she started using the bricks to build some rooms on the side of her house that she then rented out to other people. So you can just see, all these people around the world have this entrepreneurial spirit in them, and it can be something as simple as water that can unleash this in them. That the real people who are solving us are out there doing it every day, and then they're using water as a tool to do all these things. And Mama Florence is even now sending her grandchildren to school with the extra earnings that she has. So it just completes the whole circle. As we all know, lean into this as as entrepreneurs wherever we are to make it better. It's a wonderful story of what you guys have done. I hope that many of our listeners will read the worth of water, and I hope a fair number of them will decide to support what you're doing because it works and it's noble because it allows people to be more alive while they're living, which after all, is the real purpose of all this. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you, Thanks Gary, We really appreciate it for helping us spread this. Thank you. Why am I telling you? This is a production of our Heart Radio, the Clinton Foundation and at Will Medium. Our executive producers are Craigmanessian and Will Molnadi. Our production team includes Jamison Katsufas, Tom Galton, Sara Horowitz, and Jake Young, with production support from Liz Raftoree and Josh Farnham. Original music by What White. Special thanks to John Sykes, John Davidson on hell Orina, Corey Ginstley, Kevin thurm Oscar Flores, and all our dedicated staff and partners at the Clinton Foundation. Hi, I'm back at courtsild and I'm a deputy director at the Clinton Global Initiative. President Clinton established the Clinton Global Initiative to create a new kind of philanthropic community to address the complex realities of our modern world. We're problem solving, We're whired the active partnership of government, business and civil society. Over the years, are proven model has grown to include action networks that can quickly mobilize in the face of emergencies, whether that's helping Puerto Rico and the Caribbean recover in the wake of Hurricanes Rman and Maria, or advancing an inclusive US economic recovery amid COVID nineteen. To learn more about this work and see how you can get involved, visit Clinton Foundation dot org. Slash Podcast

Why Am I Telling You This? with Bill Clinton

President Bill Clinton has always been known for his ability to explain complex issues in a way that 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 35 clip(s)