Matt Damon traveled to Zambia in 2006 and saw firsthand something he had never had to think about: what it means to have no access to safe drinking water.
As he later said, the water crisis was what affected him most, because it was at the root of many other problems. “It’s something we never talk about or think about in developed countries”, he acknowledged. His comparison says it all: “The water in our toilets is cleaner than the water available to 660 million people”.
That same year, he founded the H2O Africa Foundation. In 2009, it merged with WaterPartners, the organization founded by Gary White, a water and sanitation engineer who had been working with NGOs since 1990, and Water.org was born.
Today, the organization says it has provided safe water or sanitation to more than 95 million people across four continents—a figure it reports itself. Its model is not limited to wells: it has issued more than 21,1 million microloans for safe drinking water and sanitation. It all started with something as simple as turning on a tap and having water come out.