{"id":23,"date":"2011-11-08T15:17:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-08T15:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peak-water.org\/?p=23"},"modified":"2022-07-20T19:37:51","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T19:37:51","slug":"front-range-water-grant-secondary-research-outline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.peak-water.org\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"Global War for Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

(synthesized notes from \u201cEllen McGirt\u2019s  journalistic piece featured in FastCompany Magazine entitled, \u201cMatt Damon and his global war for water,\u201d July\/August edition)*
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Color Code Legend:<\/p>\n

BLUE = Water Authorities<\/span>
\nPINK = Subject Matter Experts (SME)<\/span>
\nORANGE = Water Agreements<\/span>
\nGREEN = Special Interests\/stakeholder<\/span>
\nRED = Team Notes<\/span>
\nPURPLE = Team Key Paper Concepts<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

* all notes are either verbatim quotes or close reductions of Ellen McGirt\u2019s original article.  Quotations are only used in reference to subjects interviewed by reporters or white paper \u201csound bytes\u201d that we may reference in our research publications<\/p>\n

Once upon a time Matt Damon<\/span> went for a long walk in rural Zambia, he was accompanying a<\/span><\/span> 14-year old Zambian girl who had no idea who he was.  The walk came at the end of a 10-day African journey, a systematic primer on the complexities of the continent\u2019s extreme poverty that had been organized for Damon by staffers from his friend Bono\u2019s \u201cOne\u201d campaign.  Damon was on a quest to understand what it\u2019s like to be really, really poor.  \u201cIt was like a mini-course in college.  Every day brought a different subject on urban aids, microfinance, education, and finally water.\u201d  (TEAM \u2013 one takeaway\/aspect of this piece should be to put into perspective what a \u201cPeak Water \u201c event would be like and these impoverished African communities seem in many ways to resemble what such an event would be comparable to)<\/span><\/p>\n

While walking with the young teen on her hour-long trudge to collect water for her family something \u201cclicked\u201d for Damon.  He talked to the girl the whole time through a translater and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up \u2013 \u201cdo you want to stay here.\u201d  She got shy all of a sudden and as they walked back from the well carrying two, 5 gallon jugs of water pulled from the well, she said her dream was to go to the big city (Lusaka), and become a nurse.  Damon recalled his dreams at the same age, when he and his friend Ben Affleck were plotting their way from Boston to NYC to meet with casting agents.  The connection opened the door for Damon \u2013 \u201che remembered so well the feeling of being young, when that whole world of possibility was open to you.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But while Damon\u2019s dream was made possible by Amtrack, the girl\u2019s was only possible because someone drilled a bore well near her home \u2013 and yes, an hour\u2019s walk for water is good news in lots of places in the world.  Nearly one billion souls lack access to clean water, and three times that number lack access to proper sanitation.  \u201cThis is not something that most 14 year olds have to go through.\u201d  Without access to water, Damon\u2019s teen companion would not be able to go to school and would likely have been forced into a precarious \u201cfight-for-life,\u201d spending her days scavenging for often-filthy water in unhealthy and unsafe environments,\u201d Damon said.  \u201cNow, she can hope to be a nurse and contribute to the economic engine of Zambia.\u201d     <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOf all the different things that keep people in the kind of death-spiral of extreme poverty, water kust seemed to be so huge, and it doesn\u2019t have to be that way,\u201d according to Damon.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Damon co-founded a charity (water.org) in 2009, three years after his Zambia trip with longtime water expert and \u201cnow friend\u201d Gary White.  His vision is \u201cclean water and sanitation for everyone in our lifetime (Is it White\u2019s, Damon\u2019s, or both? That is, who\u2019s credited with the quote?)<\/span>.\u201d  Damon has since turned himself into a water expert \u2013 unusual for a celebrity to dive into the technical side of a chosen philanthropy.  Whether talking microfinance with rural bankers, giving detailed reports from the field at the annual Clinton Global Initiative, or personally thanking donors like Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, Damon quietly developed the creed of program geek.  \u201cIf you understand how it works,\u201d Damon says sounding more like an anthropologist than a celebrity spokesperson, \u201cthere\u2019s no substitute for going there and talking to people in their homes (TEAM \u2013 DS, this has to factor into your cultural behavior analyses)<\/span>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

www.Water.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Water.org is the merger of Damon\u2019s \u201cWater Africa,\u201d which he founded as a way to funnel money to well-managed Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO\u2019s) in Africa, and Gary White\u2019s \u201cWater Partner,\u201d a two decade old group that had developed a series of highly \u201cinnovative and counter-intuitive\u201d approaches to water access.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Water Partners strategy had less to do with digging wells \u2013 which, if maintained poorly, can break down and leave a place in worse shape than before \u2013 and more to do with encouraging communities in the creation and ownership of water and sanitation systems that function as mini-utilities.  These issues known as \u201cWASH\u201d in philanthropic circles \u2013 \u201cWater \u2013 Sanitation \u2013 Hygiene (WASH).\u201d  These are the least glamorous of all supportive efforts, yet are the most likely to lift a community out of poverty.  (TEAM \u2013 if true, then it stands to reason that in the U.S., that lack of a quality water and wastewater treatment capabilities will be the largest factor to negatively impact economic development in the Western states.  What say you?)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Damon and White\u2019s long collaboration ended in partnership and both took (intangible?)<\/span>     risk\u2019s.  White in that a Damon (celebrity) PR \u201cfaus paux\u201d via \u201cTMZ\u201d could negatively impact his philanthropic venture, and Damon because most philanthropic ventures come under fire  for spending a lot of money and doing very little.  White was a grant recipient of Damon    before they merged organizations.  Damon had studied White\u2019s innovations, particularly, a \u201cmicrofinance\u201d instrument know as \u201cWater Credit.\u201d (Research the term and origin).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Water.org is on track to raise $10mn, up from $4mn in 2010.  The primary use of the money is not to handout to well drillers, but to negotiate deals between micro-financial institutions and (impoverished) communities.  The organization provides the community with access to a local banker, who will then lend money to build systems that tap into a well, or a previously inaccessible water or sanitation grid.  Water.org may guarantee the loan, but repayment falls to the villagers, who work together to manage the water supply and organize credit payments.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBy using local capital markets to develop projects, people get access to the credit system,\u201c White says.  \u201cThe villagers own the project at the end of the exercise.  They\u2019re proud of it, and they have done it themselves\u201d  WWer.org claims that this approach has allowed more than 315,000 people to gain access to clean water systems that are reliable and maintained.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That leveraged success, combined with Damon\u2019s celebrity explains why donations to Water.org are on the rise and why it has earned the attention of Institutional quality\u201d funders.  (TEAM \u2013 Relative to public awareness, the public does not really seem to be aware of the real potential for a Front Range \u201cPeak Water\u201d event.  One of our cultural behavioral modification recommendations should be to suggest that local celebrities be engaged in a \u201cstate-sponsored\u201d advertising campaign to promote water conservation in conjunction with local businesses that depend on water supply.  Additionally, those local water-supply dependent businesses could endorse and promote \u201cbest conservation practices through their employee force and other public awareness programs.  Such candidate companies could include soft drink bottling firms, deep rock water, Denver & Aurora water, regional water & sanitation management authorities, local breweries, etc. <\/span>We should research what these candidate companies currently do relative to promoting PR water conservation best practices<\/span>)  <\/span>Gary White keeps a plastic bottle of dirty water (in his Kansa City office) from his last trip to Ethiopia and shakes it into a chocolate-milk froth.  This is what they were drinking.  He then shows pictures of water projects, happy children near wells, each a story of heartbreak and redemption.  Behind Gary is a white board where he sketching out the future of Water.org \u2013 we are looking for the next \u201cWater Credit\u201d he explains.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

History of Water Credit:<\/span><\/span><\/strong>   <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

White\u2019s long path began over a meal with good friends in the 1980\u2019s while he was working for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as an emergency specialist on projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Someone said, \u201cyour life should be about finding the intersection of the world\u2019s greatest need and your greatest passion.  But, in order to sit for his professional engineering exam, he had to give up his relief work and join a stateside engineering firm.  The day after Thanksgiving in 1990, he invited a 100 friends to a local Knights of Columbus hall in Kansas City to enjoy a donated dinner and show the group a slide show of the work he had done at CRS and they raised $4,000.  That money seeded the project that he started in the Honduras.  The next year, another dinner and another project \u2013 a series of annual dinners grow into a fledgling enterprise called Water Partners, which became big enough to attract institutional quality investment.  One of the first grants was for $100,000 from the Susan Del Foundation.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Still, even after White had led dozens of projects \u2013 were failing at a really high rate.  Communities had broken wells or faucets that villagers were unable to repair, or the wells produced water too dangerous than that of the filthy rivers that flowed nearby.  There were also few, if any, sanitation projects.  In the 1980\u2019s to 1990\u2019s, the approach was really about supply driven, White said.  \u201cig a well, put up a plaque, take a picture, and scram.  People were designing projects for people, not with them.\u201d  White came to understand that community engagement (a term rendered almost no meaningless by politicians, major brands, and social \u2013networking companies) is a life-or-death strategy in the developing world.  (TEAM \u2013 SME\u2019s say things like \u201cdenser development\u201d is the answer and not \u201cwater-enforcement,\u201d but denser development is a \u201cmoving forward strategy.\u201d  So how does that help with the 95% of older projects and current housing stock relative to suburban sprawl?  White\u2019s findings and understanding from his \u201cglobal\u201d property lessons in the under-developed world seems to imply that the real solution is at the individual and community level.  Celebrity PR campaigns that promote conservation best practices at the daily behavioral level would seem to offer the highest \u201creturn-on-investment (ROI) in my opinion.  For example, bath every other day, think about laundry efficiencies, at the community level modify HOA rules regarding green lawns, socialize children in schools to NOT draw pictures of homes with green lawns, promote family- water agreements to adopt more water conservation like they are doing in Douglas County, adopt best practices at the individual level like not leaving the water running when you brush your teeth, etc.  What say you?)<\/span> \u201cThere needs to be a water committee and at least 80% of the community needs to sign up and raise money for the project and participate in its construction and upkeep, \u201c White says.  That\u2019s how a project turns from \u201ctop-down\u201d to \u201cbottom-up\u201d and \u201csustainability.\u201d  (TEAM \u2013 PR campaign concept is how to change water consumer behavior from the \u201cbottom-up.\u201d)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This led to an important insight \u2013 an \u201corthogonal\u201d insight (Orthogonal \u2013 pertaining to right angles, a pair of vectors having a defined scalor product equal to zero, a pair of functions having a defined product equal to zero) <\/span>White\u2019s geeky term for the kind of thinking in which forces that appear unrelated or irrelevant help solve a problem in an unexpected way.  Extremely poor people do have some monies, and millions of them spend an inordinate amount of money on water from the equivalent of loan sharks and hucksters \u2013 opportunists with a faucet, according to White.  \u201cWe knew they (impoverished villagers) were getting water form somewhere because they were still alive,\u201d Said White.  For many of these poor communities, particularly those in \u201cquasi-urban settings,\u201d water infrastructures might be a few kilometers away.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

White put all of this together and came up with the basic thought behind Water Credit.  What if communities \u201cself-organized\u201d to get a loan to create their own wells or buy heir way into existing water access infrastructure?  \u201cWe began to work with micro-finance institutions (MFI\u2019s) instead of \u201cNon-Governmental Organizations (NGO\u2019s) (NGO \u2013 legally constituted organizations that operates independent from any government \u2013 originated from the United Nations \u2013 not part of government and a non-for-profit business.  Usually a \u201ccivil social organization.\u201d  When funded by governments, they exclude govt. reps from membership),  <\/span>infrastructure had never lent to anything that didn\u2019t have a built-in revenue source or collateral.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Convincing a local lender to take a risk means demonstrating demand, training communities to run a project, and making a case that the poor can afford to repay the loan.  A tough sell according to White, \u201cbut not impossible.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Water Credit is a micro-finance (MFI) tool that tries to leave nothing to chance.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019 suppose Water.org identifies an urban Indian community it might be able to help build a public toilet.  They rally local people into a committee to run the project, and then persuade the local utility to risk a construction project in a neighborhood that seems too poor to pay its bills.  An MFI works with a local lender to loan the committee the necessary money.  After the toilet is built, educators teach people how to pay their loan \u2013 as well as why they should use their new toilets., and for that matter wash their hands\/  All this for people in a \u201chardened cast system.\u201d  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially important for women, because research shows that projects that ultimately succeed are designed with them (women) in mind, as well as mostly maintained by them.  A woman of low status might then be in charge of collecting maintenance fees \u2013 just a few pennies \u2013 at the now \u201cpublic\u201d toilet.  That\u2019s a woman who now has a job and dignity, and no dysentery.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When Damon was filming \u201cInvictus\u201d in South Africa in 2009, he and White visited some Water Credit beneficiaries.  They would go into a slum and talk to people who had taken out a loan, had water taps or toilets in their house and already repaid the loan.  Their lives were changed.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Damon then met with some Water Credit bankers who were also excited in that many of these impoverished customers had returns for basic banking services after the experience.  Shortly after his trip to Zambia, Damon used his own production company to film a documentary film entitled, \u201cRunning the Sahara.\u201d  The film was about three \u201cUltra- Marathoners\u201d and he used the film to highlight the water issue.  (TEAM \u2013 this is an example of how a celebrity such as Damon can use their influence and artistic skills to bring a given cause to the forefront of social dialogue and thought \u2013 what say you?)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Fund raising is also a challenge for those like Damon who try to lever their celebrity.  \u201cBasically, there\u2019s the Sally Struther\u2019s  approach,\u201d he says, \u201cwhere you guilt the shit out of people and they end up turning the TV off,\u201d and most star-studded mega-events \u201cthat end up netting little to the organization.\u201d     <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Where Damon has seen \u201cStar-Studed\u201d mega-events work. Referring to a recent \u201cRobin-Hood\u201d foundation event, is where \u201cyou\u2019re doing what those Goldman (Goldman Sachs) guys do and getting Lady Gaga to raise $47mn because they\u2019re all drunk and they\u2019re trying to impress each other and they\u2019re calling out numbers from tables.\u201d  He (Damon) pauses, and laughs, \u201cof course that\u2019s the kind of fundraiser we\u2019d entertain for Water,org, but it\u2019s the exception, not the rule.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Water Credit has brought White to the pinnacle of the philanthropic world, whne in 2009 he won the \u201cSkoll Award\u201d for social entrepreneurship and a $765,000 grant including access to an unparalleled network of entrepreneurial thinkers.\u201d  Water Credit is now well beyond \u201cproof-of -concept,\u201d says Skoll\u2019s Rothchild.   Financial institutions, and other people are doing it now too.  It\u2019s a \u201cshift\u201d in the way that these systems operate. (White)\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In today\u2019s digital world, charitable engagement for Water.org is being marketed in more viral and granular ways.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, Damon can talk up the organization on Letterman, but Mike Cameron (Chief Community Officer for Water.org) is using the web to promote \u201con-the-ground, real-time,\u201d windows into the process by which these projects and communities sustainable water projects evolve so viewers can follow the progress of town hall meetings. Training sessions, negotiations, and public debates,\u201d according to White.  White added that 13% of those who sign \u2013up (on the web site), donate and 65% get a friend to visit the site.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond the obvious credit owed both Damon and White, the two have come to see that turning the poor into paying customers of a utility of their own creation spawns a \u201cconsumer consciousness\u201d that can be harnessed.  \u201cThere are development monies allocated to these communities all the time (via municipalities, NGO\u2019s, and International Aid Agencies) <\/span>that often never arrive,\u201d says White.  \u201cWhat mobile service could keep them in the loop, like 311 for the poor?\u201d  \u201cIf they knew what was coming their way, they could hold others accountable,\u201d he adds.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In some communities, a water truck shows up daily (TEAM \u2013 we talked about his in a prior team meeting whereby in the future via Peak-Water Event, we potentially foresaw a scenario whereby homes would have storage tanks, and water would be trucked in for distribution much like heating fuel oil in the northeast).  <\/span>But since the women never know the time of delivery, they can waste hours waiting with their water jugs for a truck to show up empty. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if there was a text messaging system,\u201d asks Damon, \u201cThat let\u2019s people know when the truck will show up and how full it was?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To explore possibilities such as these, the Water.org board has approved the creation of a new innovation fund that Damon kicked off with a one million dollar donation, and the Hult International Business Scholl matched.<\/span>  The fund\u2019s goal is to serve as a catalyst in the creation of new products and services specific to the \u201cbottom-of-the-pyramid\u201d water consumer.  \u201cIt\u2019s a very Sillicon Valley approach,\u201d said White.  \u201cInvent, test, innovate.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

White and Damon agree on their movement\u2019s future.  The new big thing will probably be the result of \u201corthogonal\u201d thinking.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to support people in demanding the services and aid they\u2019ve got coming to them while having an easier life in the process,\u201d White says.  What can make the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid, the people who form their customer base, better?\u201d  Mobile phone applications?  A new financing scheme?  An unconventional alliance?  A technology yet to be born?  Whatever it is, the story to be told will require more than a plastic bottle of dirty water.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

McDirt@fastcompany.com<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Facts from McGirt\u2019s Article:<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n