The Worth of Water

I had no grand illusions about the point of going on this trip. It's not like I'd be changing anybody's life. Bono likes to say that there's nothing worse than a rock star with a cause, but an actor with a cause is a close second. I winced at the mental image of me walking through the bush or an urban slum somewhere, looking concerned, and then flying home to my comfortable life. But then I thought: that's an even dumber excuse for not going than "I'm busy." The more I thought about the trip, the more I realized that I wanted to go and meet some of the people who live in these extremely poor places, to see firsthand the challenges they face, and to figure out whether there was something I could be doing to help. So I told Bono I'd go, and my older brother, Kyle, agreed to come along, too.

 

The trip was about two weeks long. It took us to slums and rural villages across South Africa and Zambia. DATA had set it up like a college mini course. Each day, we learned about a different challenge that kept people from breaking the cycle of poverty: underfunded health systems, the challenges of life in a slum, the HIV/AIDS crisis. We read briefing books about each issue, visited organizations that were trying to tackle them, and, most important, talked with the people.

 

On one of our last days in Zambia, we were going to learn about water. It wasn't clear to me why. I understood why we had been focusing on HIV/AIDS and education-these were issues that you read about in the news, issues that people talked about or signed petitions about or donated in support of. But when I heard we'd be spending the day on the "water issue," I wasn't sure what issue that was, exactly. I guessed the water was contaminated.

 

Then I read my issue brief. It said, yes, the water was contaminated-so much so that waterborne diseases were killing a child about every twenty seconds. But the water was also hard to access. There were no water pipes in these villages, no water taps in people's homes. Somebody had to go get the water and bring it back, and that somebody was almost always a woman or a girl. This was their responsibility: to walk as

Reinvention is typically done by outsiders fundamentally questioning the assumption bedrock of entire industries, and with water, the notion of using microfinance to fund public services was radical... until it wasn't.
-Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and cofounder of Sun Microsystems

Water is the ultimate systems challenge. It is a unique resource that underpins all drivers of inclusive and sustainable growth, and yet we are facing a global gap of 40 percent by the end of the decade. Gary White and Matt Damon have helped develop and prove one of the most groundbreaking ideas in decades: that people living in poverty have the capacity to solve this crisis. The Worth of Water describes how they ve done it and how closing this gap requires the centrality of those who are still in need.
-Professor Klaus Schwab, executive chairman, World Economic Forum, and cofounder, Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

A seamless rendering of their journey of discovery, setbacks and solution finding . . . White and Damon succeeded where others have failed, at least in part because they focused on solving the water delivery problem with the community and not by parachuting in with a solution decided from afar.
-Associated Press