The Worth of Water

The Worth of Water: Our Story of Chasing Solutions to the World's Greatest Challenge.
Gary White and Matt Damon.
Penguin Publishing Group. 2022. ISBN: 0593189973.
 
The Worth of Water is a 2022 non-fiction book by Gary White and Matt Damon about their effort to end the global water and sanitation crisis through market-based solutions and microfinance. It’s about 240 pages in the hardcover edition. The book narrates how the authors combined engineering, development economics, and celebrity advocacy to address the water crisis, which they define as hundreds of millions lacking nearby safe water and about 1.7 billion lacking access to a toilet. A central theme is using microfinance and ‘water credit’ so low-income households can take small loans to pay for taps, toilets, or connections, repaying from time saved and increased income, instead of relying solely on donated infrastructure such as charity-built wells. The narrative alternates between Gary White’s decades of technical and NGO work (WaterPartners, founded 1991) and Matt Damon’s path from H2O Africa (2006) towards more systemic solutions. A key turning point is their meeting at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2008, where their separate efforts merged into Water.org and, later, WaterEquity.
 
Gary White is a civil and environmental engineer who has specialized in water and sanitation for low-income communities since the 1990s. He co-founded WaterPartners (1990), which later merged with Matt Damon’s H2O Africa to become Water.org, where he now serves as CEO and cofounder. White developed WaterCredit, a microfinance-based approach that helps low-income households finance taps and toilets, and he also founded WaterEquity to mobilize private capital for water and sanitation.
 
Matt Damon is an American actor and producer who became involved in global water issues after visiting communities without safe water and toilets in Africa in the mid-2000s. In 2006 he founded the H2O Africa Foundation to support safe water projects, which later merged with White’s WaterPartners to form Water.org in 2009. Beyond his film career, Damon now works as a high-profile advocate and strategist for Water.org and WaterEquity, helping shape their direction and representing them in global forums such as the World Bank and World Economic Forum.