Matt Damon Leads the List of Guest Bloggers in the New Water Section of the Huffington Post

As an advocate helping solve the global safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) challenge, join the discussion on the new Huffington Post Water page. The blog by Matt Damon, summarized below, is the leading article on this interactive and informative page. To post your comments, read blogs and watch WASH related videos, visit Huffington Post Water.

Safe Water and a Toilet -- Is That Too Much to Ask... for 2.5 Billion People?

By the time you finish reading this paragraph one more child will have died from something that's been preventable for over a century. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population is still unable to secure a safe glass of water or access a basic toilet. While we continue to rally around the goal of ensuring safe water and sanitation for everyone, the real question we are left asking ourselves is: how do we truly approach this in a way that results in realizing this vision within our lifetime?

Even today, as solutions are known and available, lack of access to safe water and sanitation continues to claim more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. This painful reality has driven philanthropic efforts to help stop the suffering. But even after decades of charity, subsidies, multilateral aid, and investments on the part of governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the system remains inefficient and largely misses the goal of providing relief for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BOP) in their daily need to secure water.

Instead of viewing this as an ocean of people with their hands out waiting for charity-driven solutions, what if we see them as potential customers? In the past decade we have seen a paradigm shift in how we understand the BOP -- a shift that holds much promise for tackling the safe drinking water and sanitation crisis. Microfinance has been a catalyst in this, democratizing access to capital.

Through WaterCredit, Water.org has explored the application of microfinance to water and sanitation needs. With the support of the Pepsico Foundation, Water.org has reached more than 250,000 people with loans that allow them to pay connection fees for house taps and to construct toilets. Now, Water.org is taking this to scale with an $8 million grant from the Pepsico Foundation announced last Thursday and a $3.8 million grant from the MasterCard Foundation. This philanthropic capital will leverage an additional $36 million in commercial capital, reaching about one million people.

Water.org calls on NGOs, governments, utilities, philanthropists, and influencers to recommit to approaching this crisis from the perspective of the poor. This call includes raising the stakes by putting the global water and sanitation crisis on the map in a way that it truly deserves. This is a challenge worthy of the next global movement.

Water.org is honored to have the opportunity to work with Arianna Huffington, who pledged herself and her team to give this movement an incredible kick-start with the launch of a new section of Huffington Post. Ultimately, the solution will be creativity, innovation, and collective action that will allow us to achieve universal access to water and sanitation, and do so in our lifetime.

To read the full blog by Matt Damon and Gary White, visit Safe Water and a Toilet.

*********
This press release is reprinted by Alanna Shaikh out of an obscure sense of guilt. It does not represent the opinions of Alanna Shaikh or any of her employers.