Matt Damon and Gary White: Why the Global Water Crisis Is Really a Finance Problem

If you suddenly unleash the potential of a quarter of the human species, we don't know what would happen. Women and girls do these water collections. Girls aren't in school because of this. So, you know, if their life revolves around just surviving to the next day, and not getting an education and imagining the life of possibility in front of them, and going and living to the fullest, we don't know what we've lost already and what will continue to lose. Nothing matters when you wake up in the morning until you get water. Nothing else matters. Welcome to Meet the Leader. I'm Linda LaCena and I am very excited to invite into our podcast booth Gary White and Matt Damon. They are the co-founders of Water.org that is a very special organization that has improved water access and sanitation for 85 million people. 85 million. They are here to tell us how the heck they did that, but also to break down what's really needed for scale and what they have learned in 17 years of partnership since founding this organization. 17 years? My goodness. We can almost vote. Yeah, you can almost vote. Exactly. It is older than we got it. We bought a zoo. Yes, yeah, that's right. Exactly. Why don't we get started here? Can you guys give us a give the world a grade? How are we doing on protecting water? Well, if you're talking about access for for human beings around the world to clean water, we're 2.1 billion people still lack access. So one in four human beings do not have access to clean water. So I would probably say that's an F. What about you, Gary? What grade? Yeah, I think so. I think when you put it in the context that we need to put it in, and that is where as humanity overall, it's definitely an F. I think that we do see a lot of people focusing on water as a natural resource and trying to make sure it's more equitably allocated. So I'm hoping that we're going to trend upward. Absolutely. What things are contributing to this problem? Well, I think one of the things that we see as contributing significantly to it is the lack of the financial resources going into it. When you think about water and safe water, in the United States, Western Europe, we've known how to make water safe for 100 years. So it's not necessarily that we need a silver bullet or a, you know, a wit and fit a new cure for this. What we need to do is ensure that we are allocating financial resources towards this, that the utilities that supply our water are well run, that, you know, people are billing and paying for water so that the infrastructure can be maintained. A lot of these things are systems failures and a lot of that is rooted back in finance. And that's why, you know, everything we do at water.org and water equity is focused on driving financial resources to solving SDG number six. Is there a statistic on this topic that would completely shock people? Something that really speaks to you that like, gosh, when we say this to people, their eyes just widen. Well, certainly the 2.1 billion people, you know, which is one in four lacking access. That's pretty arresting. I think also a million people dying a year because of this, because of lack of access to clean water and sanitation. That's really, that's incredibly alarming and unconscionable in 2026. You know, given that as Gary said, we solved this for ourselves 100 years ago. I mean, imagine curing cancer and in 100 years, a million people a year were still dying from cancer. It would just be what our friend Bono refers to as stupid death. You know, it's just entirely unnecessary and stupid and ran wrong. You guys do a fair amount of imagining this. But a lot of us maybe haven't had the chance, which is the world look like if we get water right. You know, it's impossible to say because if you suddenly unleash the potential of a quarter of the human species, we don't know what would happen. So, you know, if their life revolves around just surviving to the next day and not getting an education and imagining the life of possibility in front of them. And going and living to the fullest, we don't know what we've lost already and what will continue to lose. Yeah, I mean, there's so much negative about this issue, but then to flip it around, I think it's a great question. Like what's the upside of people do get water as a woman I met in Uganda a few years ago. She was a grandmother in her 70s. It's just went by the name of Mama Florence and what she had been doing is getting on her bike every day and riding with Jerry cans to try to scavenge for water to find water to break back for her, her family and her grandchildren. And what we do is we help women like her get access to small affordable loans so that they can get the solutions that are best for them. So, you know, she needed about $300 to sink a well and put a pump in there. And once she had that, she was able to then start giving her family safe water. But she also started growing a vegetable garden. So she had vegetables to improve the health of her family. And the scraps from the vegetables she was then speeding to pigs to raise pigs for her family and for income. And then, you know, she figured out that the soil around her house was clay and that she could take the water and mix it and form bricks and start selling bricks. And then ultimately she used the bricks to build some rooms on her pot of land that she would then rent out. So here's this woman who, you know, took to her 70s to have her kind of entrepreneurial spirit unleashed. And the reason it was is because of water. And that's the thing, you know, nothing matters when you wake up in the morning until you get water. And so if you are always kind of behind the, you know, the curve because you're spending so much of your energy time and resources just getting water, it's never going to let you move on and develop economically. We have some sense of what that would look like. But if we could unleash the potential of those 2.1 billion people, I think the planet would look very different and look prosperous. And it's a beautiful story because of what she did, but think of it the other way. What if she had had access from the time she was seven rather than 70? You know, what would she have done with that with that life, right? And so that's what we're talking about right now for young women all over the world. You guys make the point in the book that you co-wrote the worth of water. That ultimately the water crisis is a finance problem. Can you tell us a little bit about that? That's kind of our origin story. You know, we partnered and we were doing direct impact work like most people in the water space. But direct impact work is well drilling. We were very good at that actually. Half of all water projects fail within five years. Because a lot of trial and error that Gary went through, he started this in 1990. And so from what he learned and how to implement these systems, he was doing it very successfully. But when we partnered, he had kind of had this epiphany that, "A, there was never going to be enough charity in the world to get this done. If you look at the scale of the problem and the numbers that charity could reach, you were faced with just a sad truth. And as he said to me, we can continue to be like ostriches with our head in the sand or we can innovate." And he had already started to do that. And he pioneered this idea that we call water credit, which is essentially taking what Muhammad Yunus pioneered at the Grameen Bank and micro-loaning and redirecting it towards the water space. And that was a whole journey to bring the microfinance institutions along because they did not believe or they had not have faith that loans would be repaid for water because they're not standard income generating loans. They're income enhancing loans because you're buying somebody's time back, the time that they're wasting, going and collecting water, the time that they're wasting, going and queuing up at a water point, which is terribly inefficient. Also, the insight that he had was people were actually already paying for water in these communities, right? And sometimes 25% of their income. They had no savings, but day in and day out they would pay. So his hypothesis was that if you could front alone to these people, they would pay it back because also nobody takes out a loan for something they don't want. So this would be a sustainable solution that worked locally for this person in that community. And that idea was unproven when we started and it's been just such a success story. I mean, it's beyond anything we could have hoped, 98% of these loans pay back. And that's astonishing when you realize that these are the most economically vulnerable people on the planet. Mostly women, by the way, 90% of our borrowers are women because this is an issue that disproportionately affects women and girls. And it turns out if you just nudge the market towards them and get out of their way, they will solve their own problems. And that's what we've seen. We've done over 15 million of these loans and they pay back at 98%. So that's a very real number. And that led us, you know, that success led us into the next stage of our journey. And generally, what is the overall impact that. what a credit has had. - Well, water credit, water credit has basically taken the model that Matt has talked about where we have these financial partners around the world that are making household level loans. So we have about over 200 financial partners around the world that now are making loans. And that's because we've used our philanthropic capital in a way that nudges the market. De-risk some of these portfolios provides technical assistance to MFI's, these microfinance banks so that they can market the loans. And what happened was that the demand for these loans really blew up in a way that a lot of these financial partners needed more capital. And so Matt and I were in India in 2015, quizzing all of our partners about like, what's holding you back? And they said, we need more capital, more affordable access to capital. And so that's where we kind of hatched this idea in the back of a Jeep to start a fund to actually provide debt to some of those partners. And that works really well. And then we decided, let's blow this up. And so we launched an asset manager that was now the named water equity. Water equity raises debt and equity in the US and Europe in a way that we can connect it to those financial institutions. They connect it to the women who need water and toilets. And then the funds come back up to chain so that we can provide financial returns to investors. And they get tremendous social impact with that as well. And so we've now done six funds. And we've brought in about about a half a billion dollars in committed capital to be able to scale this up. And to me, that's the evolution. That's what we do at Water Tide, Oregon. We evolve, we innovate. And talk about getting the head out of the sand. What we see is the only way we're going to solve this crisis in the long term is if we can connect women who need water with the capital market through water equity. And that's exactly what we did. We're kind of like financial plumbers that connect that capital with people who need access to water so that along that value chain everybody benefits. And then when you can use charity to then use it as a springboard to the financial markets, that's when you can really solve big humanitarian issues. You guys have kind of gone from in the very, very beginning thinking about, hey, is it just about getting more wells to doing things like de-risking loan portfolios? Right, right. That's what we love saying because it's like, it's not where we saw ourselves ending up and it's where we did end up. But I will say that there's another statistic I love, which is, had we just stayed drilling wells, which again, we were kind of best in class there, it would have taken us 600 years just to get to where we are right now. And we're accelerating, we're reaching a million people every six weeks. So many well-meaning projects, as you know, we talked you were mentioning about the wells. Good, good things. Very difficult to scale, right? And we've seen this in the sustainability space. In your experience, from what you've seen, are there maybe two or three elements or ingredients that an idea or concept needs to make sure that it can scale? Well, I think that on just kind of level set a little bit in terms of there is a need for kind of this direct impact in wells. And wells can be done in a way that are sustainable. And the problem is the financial resources for that. And I think that's what, if we really want to scale the solve the problem, what we see is solutions like water credit and financial innovation, that recognizes that everyone in the world isn't too poor and that they're not equally poor, that they all need charity. So let's carve that off and figure out how can we reach, you know, hundreds of millions of people with access to finance so that the government resources are then freed up to be directed to like having really good well-drilling programs and really sustainable programs. Because if you can put the resources behind that to make sure that the communities are in charge of those projects, to make sure that they know how to maintain those projects and put all of that into place, then I think we can have a scaled solution that meets some of the needs of the most destitute who are like in rural areas of Ethiopia, who maybe water credit doesn't work for, but there's enough subsidy coming in now because so many people are served through the market mechanism. That's kind of the classic, you know, applying capitalism in a way that is serving everybody from the base of the pyramid on up. - And so basically what you're saying is that we have to kind of build that flywheel by sort of making sure that we're part of the market. Is that what you're saying? - Exactly. - Exactly. - Exactly, yeah. - You have a special initiative that I just launched at Davos, can you talk a little bit about GitBlue? - Sure, yeah, we're very excited about this. We came here to announce it. It's a partnership. So GitBlue, the GitBlue initiative is, it's inspired by red, by this incredible success of the red campaign and which is still ongoing, but that's a way to contextualize it. And so it'll be a consumer facing initiative that's gonna allow our partners like GAP, like Starbucks, like Amazon and EcoLab to engage with their customers in the case of the first three. And you know, imagine going into Starbucks and instead of buying a cup of coffee with, you know, the green siren on it, you buy a cup of coffee with a blue siren and they'll put us up on their app, which tens of millions of people engage with every single day. It's a way to try to move this, you know, on the awareness front into the public consciousness, as well as a way to raise money that will be directed to Water.org directly into these programs that we're talking about which will allow us to keep scaling. These are the first four major companies and we're here recruiting other corporate partners because we really need as much support and leverage as we can gather for what we want to be a movement. You know, but if we can connect a consumer, right now, there's a 13 year old girl in the developing world, you know, who is gathering water every day rather than being in school. And what if you can connect a 13 year old girl who buys a Get Blue sweatshirt or you know, a certain a blue drink at Starbucks, basically directly to that person. You know, in our programs, it's, we've driven the philanthropic cost of capital to reach each person. The standard in the water space is $25 to get somebody water for life. In our programs, it's $5. Because of the nature of the program, because it's a loan that goes out and as it's repaid, it goes out again. And so every time it goes out, and you know, the cost to reach each person goes down for just $5. You're getting somebody on the other side of the earth clean water for life. And how does this help maybe bridge this awareness gap that people have where probably a lot of people in the rich world don't really think very much about water at all? How does it help bridge that gap? - This is our number one. This is the first hurdle we always have to clear is awareness, right? Because it's such an unrelatable problem for those of us who grew up in, as you call it, the rich world, right? You're never that far from a drink of water. And as such, you can't really relate to this problem. If you were to raise money for AIDS or cancer research, everybody's been touched personally by these things, but through their family or their friends. And so we all can relate to that. It really resonates with us on an emotional level. Whereas this just feels more like an intellectual concern because even if you hear the magnitude of the problem, it seems so overwhelming and also so distant that it's hard to kind of get engagement. So what we're hoping with Get Blue is that it really moves it into the public consciousness because of the ubiquity of the campaign. And it just becomes something that everybody in the developed world starts to become aware of, particularly the younger generations, who the data shows that they really want to purchase with purpose. And so that's the hope behind this movement. - There's a lot of talk about how to really have solutions for the future, especially sustainable solutions. We need to have new types of partnerships, right? One's that maybe are pre-competitive. One's that maybe wouldn't have thought about maybe 20 years ago or something like that. When you're kind of looking at campaigns like this or maybe other things that you guys have put together, what's important for the private sector to be considering when it comes to being creative on how they can tackle sustainability? What are your thoughts? - Well, I think the private sector's interested in solutions of work. I think the private sector recognizes, yes, they do want to be philanthropic, but they know that it doesn't end there. And so I think they're looking for solutions that kind of resonate with them and with business and with the markets. And so Giploo is just a culmination of taking those relationships to a whole different level that goes beyond just their philanthropy and into their communities. We work through local experts, local institutions, and we partner with them and help them get the resources that they need to develop these low-importfolios and to have impact. Our most recent funds that we've developed, we can now actually invest in entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises around the world that there's so many entrepreneurs out there that want to solve this crisis, but they lack the capital. So there's lots of startups out there. And so we're able to invest debt and equity into some of those enterprises so that they can start scaling their efforts so that they can reach even more communities with water and sanitation solution. So it's all about partnerships and trying to figure out how do you position yourself as a catalyst to put all these things together so it sparks from top to bottom? Absolutely. You talked a little bit of partnership. So water.org, now correct me if I'm wrong here. Water.org is more than 30 years old, right? Is that correct? Yeah. 1990. Well, we, Matt and I started Water.org and by merging our organizations in 2009, I started to water partners back in 1990 and Matt started in 2006. But then joined with Gary and, and, uh, oh, nine. And Gary, you're, tell us a little bit about your background so people understand. I, I first learned about this crisis when I was an undergrad in, in engineering. And you know, I, I was looking for this intersection between engineering and social justice. And, uh, once I discovered the water crisis, it's like that. That's what I'm, I'm going to do. And I started an organization at my university that would allow engineers to, to travel and volunteer. Um, and as Matt has talked about our weld drilling, I thought I, I got three engineering degrees, right? I, I would trade it in at least two of those for a finance degree because this is, this is a completely different playing field than what I thought it was going to be. But you, but you know, that, that engineering background also put in me like this, this fierce problem solving, okay? Kind of, you know, activated that gene in me and that's what the success of this is about. It's about, it's about finding solutions. And that's what we're about. We were water in geo now, or a global financial institution with an asset manager. I mean, how crazy is that? But you know, it works because more and more people are coming in with the philanthropy. And then that's catalyzing the investment. And so we'll be up to billions of dollars of assets under management, uh, in a few years to be able to tack this problem. And Matt, you had your own water organization. Tell us briefly about the work you were doing. When I first learned about the crisis, I started with a few other people, something called H2O Africa. Our, our plan at the time, even though we knew, okay, this isn't going to be enough, but as a stop gap measure, like it's doing something. And I know I can use my platform to raise money to funnel it to NGOs that we identify that are doing really good work across Africa. And so that's what we did for a few years until I, you know, it felt meaningful. It made me feel good that we were reaching thousands of people with clean water. But I knew and I just made the decision that I needed to find the preeminent partner, you know, in the space who was just the absolute expert in the space. And that's, that's led me very quickly to Gary. And, and, and that's when we, you know, we met in 2008 and we realized how aligned we were with our mission. And, and so we joined forces in 2009 and rebranded ourselves as water.org. What did you both see in each other's capabilities and maybe interest that you felt like gosh, I'll be able to scale my impact if I partner with this individual. What did you both see in each other? Well, when I saw in Matt when I first met him was his, his curiosity and, and the questions and the probing and I could tell just by the, the questions he was asking about our model and what we're doing and then listening to the answers and then asking different questions. That, that just, you know, demonstrated to me that like the intellect was there and he'd already demonstrated the passion and putting his time into it by starting another nonprofit. So it, to me, once we started to kind of connect at that passion level and that intellectual level, then it was just a matter of like, how do we, how do we work together? Gary came exactly as advertised as, as the expert in this space and I think there were a number of things. I mean, I did ask him every question I could think of and he had an answer for everything. You know, he'd already been doing this for a couple decades. He had an huge wealth of experience and he talked really openly about failures. He actually led with those because he explained because of the lesson that would come out of each one, well, I did this and this didn't work and here's why. And then he started to talk about market-based solutions. That's a thought leap for somebody coming into this and going, well, wait a minute, we're talking about the poorest people in the world. You want them, you want to give them a loan very quickly. He just explained. People in these communities are paying already. This, this loan is going to be, the loan that they pay off is going to be less than they're actually already paying for water and within two years once the loan is complete, they're connected to the system and they're completely free and clear of this daily expense that's burdening them right now. And so it was counterintuitive until he told me that and then it made total sense and and then there was that the whole journey of proving it, right? And that took a lot of time and it wasn't until 2012 that we hit our first million people, which was a big celebration for us, a million people, but he had started in 1990, so it was 22 years in the making. And now like we said, it's every six weeks that we hit a million people. So it's really, you know, it's been this wonderful, wonderful partnership and it's one of the greatest decisions I ever made in my life was partnering with Gary because I was looking to maximize the impact that I personally could have and nobody could have done it more. I love this idea of leading with failure when it comes to considering innovation. Why is that so important? Well, because if you're not failing sometimes, you're not, you're not experimenting, you're not probing. So yeah, we could have kept with direct impact in drilling wells and we wouldn't have failed to have probably very often at all, you know, because that becomes kind of like making widgets. You know, you just stamp one more out and you kind of, you kind of go on. And you know, it, you can see the pieces of the puzzle, you can understand when you sit with the woman and talk to her about how does she get water today. And that's, you know, a humbling experience to like, am I a really an expert? No, she's the expert because somehow every day she finds water for her family and it's hard. And then you understand you start to feel back the layers like, you know, how far did you have to walk? And it's like, you know, what would you do if you didn't have to walk for a while? I would go to work over here because I have a friend who's doing this job and I could do that too. I met an elderly woman who was in her 80s and she had taken out a loan from a loan shark as paying 125% interest just so she could build a toilet and have privacy of that toilet in her home. I met a woman in the Philippines who was paying $2 a day to a water vendor because she didn't have a connection to the water system in her slum. She didn't have the $300 a cost to connect but she had $2 every day to buy water. So she was paying $60 a month for that. She took out a loan and her loan payments for $5 a month, her water bill now is $5 a month. So you basically, you absorb these lessons from people who are living water poverty and then that's where you start to experiment. Now it's not a straight line. I remember the first time we made a foray into this, we were trying to make loans to water in Geos and Kenya who were very much accustomed to just getting grants. So we made loans to them and they were going to work with communities and the communities weren't well trained and so the half the loans had to be written off and we're like, okay, we're not going to be a bank. That was a dumb idea. So the key to what we're going to do is like piggyback onto those financial institutions that already have banking relationships with these individuals and with these communities. But that was a hard slog because those microfinance banks would make a loan for a cow for instance. They would do that because you're milking the cow, you know, by the end of the week you are selling milk, you got cash flow and you repay the loan and these MFIs would say there's no way we're going to loan for a water connection because it's not income generating and that's where we had to kind of provide this nudge and basically share a risk with them to the experiment to develop new loan portfolios that would target all of these different water and sanitation solutions and then that's what it took. It took us de-risking financial institutions instead of trying to be one and that's when it really sparked and took off. Well, what is maybe one way that you guys work differently, maybe make decisions differently, ask questions differently since working together? Is there one thing that each one of you have like, you know, gosh, I do that only because I work with Gary, only because I work with him. Sure, yeah, Gary, from the time we started Water.org, Gary insisted on a new Ventures Fund for exactly what he's just talked about, this idea of pushing the envelope, right? Knowing that not all of these things are going to work, but had he not had that idea, that innovative drive, water credit never would have come to be. We wouldn't have reached all these people. There was built in to our whole plan, was a new Ventures Fund to pilot things and see what the next water credit might be. It's always about exploring ways in which we can maximize impact. Well, what I've learned is you can't just be a wonky engineer and move people's hearts in mind. And of course, that's what Matt does in spades. And so I just, you know, I learned from him as I sit back and listen to him filter this work through his ability to reach audiences, to tell stories and to move people. And he certainly, you know, pretty much a great water. expert now, but I don't think I'm much more of an actor. Don't say I'm so sure. Well, we're going to do some rapid response questions and very quick ones. So first thing you guys do in the morning, feed my dogs, wake up and meditate. Best thing you've stopped doing. I can't wait to get to that point where I have time to meditate in the morning. It's like getting fired out of a cannon. Sorry, for was the second one. I haven't emptied that. No, I know. Progressive. I gave up sugar or the start of the year for a month. So that's my that's top of mind because I really want something sweet right now. Oh, yeah, I stopped eating gluten actually and that was a game changer for me. How about you can't work with that coffee? Yeah, yeah, that's I agree. Coffee. I really tried. Doesn't work. The biggest challenge you see for the rest of 2026. Well, the biggest challenge. I mean, the one that's going to take up all our time is get blue. You know, in success, it can be it can really have an profound impact on the water crisis. And so that's that's I think what we're focused on. Yeah, focusing on what is still positive in the world. And leaders listening to this. What is the one thing they should be prioritizing? Is there one thing that has to move forward this year to kind of set us up for where we need to be maybe 20 30 20 40? What's one thing they should be prioritizing this year? The the 2.1 billion people who don't have access to water and the 3.4 billion who lack access to adequate sanitation. But you're Gary. Yeah, because I think they should be paying attention to like what are good investments for their countries and their communities. And certainly investing in water has multiple returns on the capital, both economically for their countries, but also from humanity perspective. And fortunately, that is all the time that we have today. Thanks so much to our very amazing guests, Gary and Matt. And thanks to you for listening. 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