Action hero

At the heart of an industry where success and failure is defined numerically – opening weekend, box office gross, fee-per-picture – Matt Damon has other, far more pressing statistics on his mind. He’s thinking about the 3.4 million people who die every year from a water-related illness, a population almost equivalent to that of the entire city of Los Angeles, his home. He’s thinking about the fact that every 51 seconds, a child dies as a consequence of their inability to access clean water.

He’s thinking about the one in nine people on Earth who lack access to an improved water source – one likely to be protected from contamination, in particular from contamination with faecal matter.

“People talk about the global water crisis and what’s coming down the road,” Damon says. “We just want to keep reminding them that for 748 million people, the crisis is already here.”

Damon’s personal wake-up call came in 2006, when he joined a fact-finding mission to Africa organised by DATA, the nonprofit co-founded by U2 frontman and veteran campaigner Bono. DATA, which stands for Debt, AIDS, Trade, and Africa, would arrange tours for individuals so that they might see first-hand the difficulties surrounding apparently intractable problems.

While much of the focus fell on HIV/AIDS initiatives and microfinance schemes, Damon spent one day learning about the role that water – or its lack – plays in the perpetuation of misery.

“I knew I wanted to engage with issues of extreme poverty, and I knew there were all these pressing problems that I needed to know more about,” he recalls. I was shocked and amazed that I hadn’t heard more about the impact that water has on poverty, and that more people back home in the US weren’t talking about it.

"At that time the US had a big engagement on AIDS, and yet water was killing far more children.”

At the time of Damon's trip, a child was dying every 15 seconds as a consequence of a lack of access to clean water and sanitation.

“Where I grew up you just had to walk over to the tap and turn it on,” says Damon. “We were never thirsty, and I didn’t know anyone who had ever been thirsty in their life. So it was very hard to relate to the fact that all of these kids were dying of diseases where the cure was essentially clean water.

“Children in America might get diarrhoea and they might miss a day of school with the stomach bug but that’s the extent of it," he continues. "It’s certainly not something that’s life threatening.”

Damon returned from Africa with an understanding that a lack of access to water can underpin a whole host of issues that contribute to extreme poverty: the ability to earn an income, attend school, or even survive childbirth, among them. The scale of the problem was at once intimidating and invigorating. Here was a challenge that would not be solved in a year or a decade, but one that would require lifelong commitment.

“I chose water for its enormity and its complexity,” says Damon. “It looked like something that was going to be interesting to engage with over my entire life, and I’ve certainly found that to be true.”

When Damon narrated a documentary film about three men attempting to become the first humans to run coast-to-coast across the Sahara Desert, he and his producing partners saw an opportunity. They launched a small foundation named H2O Africa, with the goal of raising money and awareness for charities doing good work in improving access to water in remote and impoverished communities.

They identified projects while planning and filming the expedition, which took place across Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya, and Egypt. Damon was able to use his profile to raise money for specific NGOs operating within those countries.

“It was a great way to look at some of these affected areas, and also to push some funding to some people who were doing really good work,” he says. “There was so much low-hanging fruit, so many people who were affected by this, that my thinking was that if I could raise the money to sink a few bore wells, then I could reach a certain amount of people.

“Even at the time I knew it wasn’t the most sophisticated way of attacking the problem, but I wanted to do something,” he continues. “We didn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and so we just jumped in and found people who were doing work we believed in, and raised money so they could continue doing that work.”

But the limitations of H20 Africa’s approach were a source of frustration to its founder, who understood that in order to achieve lasting change, a more strategic methodology was required.

“We certainly helped people but I realised a couple of things really quickly,” he recalls. “The first was that we were attacking the problem in the wrong way. The second was that we could do much better on an organisational level, too.”

As he delved deeper into the issues surrounding access to water, Damon reached a tipping point: he could continue to fund existing projects on a piecemeal basis, or he could rip up his own script, and start again.

“You get to that moment where you look at the scale of the problem and you look at your efforts, and I think that’s the moment where a lot of people give up,” he suggests. “But that’s when you have to go for it. You tell yourself that you have something to offer, and that if you re-examine what you’re doing and go about it in a new way, then maybe you can really move the needle.”