Beri Maric the CEO of the Ivy taught me today that Matt Damon is very similar to Leonardo DiCaprio not because they're both fantastic actors but because they care deeply about the environment, social causes, and improving the world on a global scale. Matt is involved in clean water to save lives. The most crazy fact is the one of over a million children dying a year from preventable causes as you will read about below in the diarrhea section.
The talking points from the interview are below:
- What is the Scale of the Global Water Crisis?
Water insecurity is defined as the lack of easy access to sufficiently clean and safe water for basic human needs. We’ve known how to make water safe in the United States for more than a hundred years, and still, 771 million people across the world don’t have this access. Imagine if we cured cancer and in a hundred years, people were still dying of cancer in certain parts of the world. That’s where we are with water.
A million children under the age of five die every year for completely preventable reasons, like diarrhea. In the United States that would maybe keep a child out of school for one day. Additionally, dehydration can literally be a death sentence in some parts of the world. These are not things that should be killing children, but they are. There are very real numbers, but what can not be measured is the potential that’s lost in somebody’s life.
There is a further, crucial inequity embedded in the problem of water insecurity. Lack of access to clean water disproportionately affects women. Many girls aren’t in school because they spend their whole day trying to find water for their families. This precludes countless women from living up to their full potential. Our mission is to ensure that everyone on earth has access to clean water and sanitation, and we envision that happening in our lifetime
- How Business and Finance Can Resolve the Global Water Crisis
If we really zoom out, it would cost $1 trillion to solve this problem, and not solving it costs an estimated $300bn per year. The solution requires investments in infrastructure, sanitation, and pipes that carry water to people’s homes and carry the waste away. Some of the poorest people on earth pay 10 to 15 times more for water than the middle class. They’re either paying a vendor for water, or they’re paying with their time by standing in a line at a public water place or walking around trying to find it. The time people waste every day walking to collect water when they could be working in a paying job, the needless deaths, needless illnesses, girls being out of school, and the lost economic potential–all of these are what we call coping costs, and these costs add up to about 300 billion a year.
By providing microloans for water solutions, you can buy somebody’s time back and make the system more efficient. Initially, microfinance institutions were really reluctant to do that because they didn’t see that as an income-generating loan. However, when you buy somebody’s time back, you are making so many other things much more efficient. When they get a loan, and they get a water connection, put in a pump or water filter, that really allows them to be liberated and move on to that next rung of the economic ladder, using the time that they save at a paying job and having more sustainable food for themselves. Girls get an education. So far, we’ve done almost 10 million loans that have reached 43 million people this way. 99% of these loans pay back.
With the amount of money it would take to solve the water crisis ($1 trillion), there’s no way we’re going to solve it with just charity. We’ve got to bring the capital markets to bear. We’ve got to do it in a fair and equitable way for everybody in the system, particularly poor women who live in need of water and sanitation. When we create that financial plumbing that connects someone who wants an attractive financial return in the capital markets with someone making a few dollars a day, everybody has value created, and you take out the friction that you might see in traditional philanthropy. Viewing this crisis as a business problem instead of a philanthropic one opens the door to so many possibilities and creates a much more reliable solution, one that doesn’t rely upon the kindness of strangers.
- What are the Most Critical Obstacles, and How Can we Help?
Almost 10 years ago, all of our microfinance partners were reporting back that their biggest bottleneck was access to affordable capital. Subsequently, that capital was not getting to the infrastructure providers. The demand for providing this kind of capital was absolutely there. We were convinced that there were many people out there who done very well in life, and wanted some kind of return in the market, but also wanted their money to do good in the world.
That’s the purpose behind WaterEquity. We enable our corporate partners to invest using their treasury function, where they can earn returns while also playing a key part is solving the global water crisis. That flywheel of impact allows us to create an even more sustainable model, where the management fees that we get as an asset manager get pumped back into the work of our charity to scale up to maximize the good we do. With our next fund, we will be managing about $200 million in assets. We’re focused on securing more capital from investors and investing it in infrastructure, so when people come with their microloans to connect to the utility, there are pipes in the ground.
