Matt Damon: ‘Children are drinking water so dirty it looks like chocolate milk’ | David Smith

The Hollywood star reveals how a conversation with an ambitious 14-year-old in Zambia inspired a project to help people in dire need of clean water

Jetlagged after a flight from Australia, Matt Damon is wearing a smart dark suit with a crisp white shirt as he sits at the headquarters of the World Bank in Washington. He is barely distinguishable from countless technocrats converging on this cathedral of global capitalism.

The Hollywood actor and co-founder of water.org is here to be interviewed by the Guardian but first he has some questions of his own. What’s going to happen in the British election? And will there be another Scottish referendum?

Damon is, after all, a man of the world: one week it is the Oscars in Los Angeles, another it is a remote village in Africa or India. In the first arena he is instantly recognisable from films including Good Will Hunting, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ocean’s Eleven and the Jason Bourne series. In the second, he is usually anonymous, a feeling he describes as “great”.

Once, at a market in Zambia, Damon came across an entrepreneur who had opened a “cinema” using adjacent stalls with curtains that could be pulled to keep out the daylight. “He had the covers of the bootleg DVDs outside the movie theatre and one of them was The Bourne Supremacy,” the actor laughs. “I guess I was supposed to be mad at him for pirating the movie but we took a picture instead.”

Zambia was also the country where Damon, 46, had his lightbulb moment as a social activist. He collected water with a girl of about 14 and they hit it off, walked for a mile and talked. “I was kind of interrogating her,” recalls Damon. “‘What are you going to do when you grow up? Are you going to stay in this village?’ She got this smile on her face and said, ‘No, no, I’m going to move to the big city, I’m going to move to Lusaka. I’m going to be a nurse.’”

It struck a personal chord. “It just reminded me of the kind of conversations that Ben Affleck and I had when we were that age: we’re going to move to New York, we’re going to move to the big city and be actors. I really related to this kid and realised as I was driving away that, had someone not had the foresight to sink this borewell a mile from her house, she wouldn’t be in school, she wouldn’t have any of these kinds of hopes and dreams. She would spend her days scavenging for water.

“So besides the stupid, pointless and completely preventable death by the millions of these children under five every year, there are all of these other kind of incalculable impacts that lack of access to clean water and sanitation will have for a person. That just lit a fire under me.”

Damon launched his own water charity then ran into Gary White, who had a project of his own, at the Clinton Global Initiative nearly a decade ago. They joined forces to create water.org, which provides small loans to people in dire need of access to water and sanitation.

Damon explains: “The poorest of poor are actually already paying for water, and in a lot of cases paying more than the middle class. If you’re not connected to the infrastructure then you’re taking time away from a job to go to a common water source and spend hours waiting in line with your jerrycan to fill up and bring it home. It’s incredibly inefficient.”

These people are wasting time and money – for example on bottled water from vendors that can cost 10 or 15 times more than tap water – at an estimated worldwide cost of $300bn (£235bn) a year, White says. White’s big idea was to find a way to redirect that money to connecting homes and installing toilets. The “community buy-in” is seen as a better long-term bet than aid dropped from on high; Damon remembers seeing a state-of-the-art well system in India that had fallen into disrepair, forcing children to revert to a hand-dug well with water “so dirty it looked like chocolate milk”.

Damon continues: “Gary had this realisation: because people are paying daily, if you could actually front them the money to connect it to existing infrastucture, they’d be able to pay that loan back. It met some resistance at first because it was a new type of loan, because it wasn’t income generating. It wasn’t the kind of classic microfinance: I loan you money, you buy a sewing machine and then you can start a tailoring business or something.”

Water.org has partnered with 65 local microfinance institutions across nine countries, providing $17m in subsidies, with India a particular focus so far. These microfinance institutions have attracted $280m in local investment capital, helping more than 5 million people pay for the construction of a water connection, toilet or both at their home. The average loan is about $188 and paid back over two years; the repayment rate is an impressive 99%.

White weighs in: “We’re all about what are the barriers that are keeping water and sanitation from the poor and how can we tear those down, and the first ones we found were around finance.”

While the pair were in Washington lobbying finance ministers to support loans in water and sanitation – an estimated 565 million people could benefit – just a few blocks away the occupant of the White House seems less than enthusiastic about foreign aid. Donald Trump has proposed cutting the budget for the state department and the Agency for International Development by 28% while pouring money into the US military.

Damon is worried about this new direction but says: “This president has already shown some flexibility in his thinking as he goes deeper on some of these issues … With water, for every dollar you put in, you get seven dollars out. I think the benefit might appeal to his business brain … if you’re doing it right, it really is an effective use of the taxpayers’ money and saves you a lot long-term.”