March 31, 2022 • 35 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
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
(00:23):
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
(00:43):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:48):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:54):
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
(03:14):
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,
(03:37):
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
(03:58):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:04):
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,
(05:25):
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
(05:47):
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,
(06:07):
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,
(06:28):
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,
(06:51):
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
(07:12):
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
(07:34):
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.
(07:58):
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
(08:19):
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
(08:40):
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
(09:01):
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,
(09:23):
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
(09:45):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:26):
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,
(10:47):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:29):
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,
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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,
(12:34):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:19):
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,
(13:40):
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,
(14:04):
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
(14:24):
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,
(14:47):
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
(15:08):
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,
(15:31):
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
(15:52):
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,
(16:14):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:20):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:05):
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
(18:27):
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
(18:48):
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
(19:11):
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
(19:34):
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
(19:56):
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,
(20:18):
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.
(20:39):
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.
(21:02):
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
(21:26):
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,
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:53):
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,
(23:18):
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,
(23:41):
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
(24:04):
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
(24:36):
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
(24:58):
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
(25:20):
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
(25:41):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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
(27:06):
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
(27:27):
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,
(27:50):
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
(28:11):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:55):
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
(29:18):
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,
(29:40):
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
(30:04):
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
(30:25):
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
(30:47):
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
(31:09):
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
(31:30):
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
(31:52):
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
(32:13):
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
(32:35):
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
(32:57):
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
(33:17):
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
(33:40):
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
(34:01):
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,
(34:23):
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
(34:47):
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
(35:10):
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
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
(00:23):
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
(00:43):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:48):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:54):
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
(03:14):
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,
(03:37):
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
(03:58):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:04):
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,
(05:25):
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
(05:47):
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,
(06:07):
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,
(06:28):
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,
(06:51):
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
(07:12):
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
(07:34):
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.
(07:58):
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
(08:19):
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
(08:40):
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
(09:01):
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,
(09:23):
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
(09:45):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:26):
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,
(10:47):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:29):
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,
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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,
(12:34):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:19):
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,
(13:40):
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,
(14:04):
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
(14:24):
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,
(14:47):
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
(15:08):
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,
(15:31):
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
(15:52):
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,
(16:14):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:20):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:05):
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
(18:27):
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
(18:48):
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
(19:11):
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
(19:34):
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
(19:56):
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,
(20:18):
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.
(20:39):
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.
(21:02):
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
(21:26):
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,
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:53):
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,
(23:18):
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,
(23:41):
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
(24:04):
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
(24:36):
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
(24:58):
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
(25:20):
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
(25:41):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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
(27:06):
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
(27:27):
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,
(27:50):
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
(28:11):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:55):
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
(29:18):
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,
(29:40):
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
(30:04):
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
(30:25):
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
(30:47):
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
(31:09):
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
(31:30):
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
(31:52):
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
(32:13):
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
(32:35):
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
(32:57):
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
(33:17):
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
(33:40):
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
(34:01):
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,
(34:23):
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
(34:47):
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
(35:10):
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
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