Matt Damon Tries to Get Clean Water and Toilets for India’s Poor

Brendon Thorne/Getty Images Matt Damon at a premiere of the film “Elysium” in Sydney, Australia, on Aug. 12.

Matt Damon finds it a challenge to get people to care about water. It’s why he was in India from Aug. 23 to 26 on a four-day tour. Not to promote his latest film Elysium, a sci-fi dystopia with a socialist underpinning, but to help the rural and urban poor in India get access to clean water and sanitation by investing in tube wells, hand pumps and toilets with proper drainage facilities.

Mr. Damon cofounded Water.org, a Missouri-based nonprofit organization that partners with microfinance institutions to facilitate loans, so that people can afford the “dignity of a toilet” and “clean water.” In the five years that the organization has been active in India, it has helped 500,000 people in 11 states get microloans, and now the goal is increase this to 800,000 by 2016. It is a high bar that Mr. Damon and the group’s cofounder, Gary White, have set for themselves. Along with Mr. White, an engineer who has been working in the field of water sanitation for 23 years, Mr. Damon visited villages in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and urban slums in Bangalore, talking to women and children who have benefited from the project.

The actor has shed all traces of his latest character â€" the bald, tattooed, gun-toting Max Da Costa desperate for salvation in Elysium. On his India tour, he was Matt Damon, the philanthropist fighting for clean water, a role he takes very seriously.

“Going out, doing these side visits and talking to women about how empowering and liberating this is for them is the funnest part,” Mr. Damon said in an interview in Mumbai on Monday. Instead of spending hours waiting to collect water, women can seek employment and earn an income.

“To hear that they no longer have to leave the house when the sun goes down and walk out for open defecation because there is no toilet,” he said. “It’s very emotional to talk about these very, very real changes. It is sheer joy.

He arrived in India Sunday afternoon, and spent two days in villages at Kanchipuram, Pondicherry and Villupuram in Tamil Nadu, after which he traveled to Bangalore, where he toured two urban slums and spoke to women and self-help groups.

A woman Mr. Damon and Mr. White spoke to in Bangalore used to pay two rupees every time she wanted to use a public toilet. On a typical day, she and her family of seven would spend 20 rupees to use the toilet and an equal amount on bathing facilities. The woman and her family were committed to getting a water and sanitation loan, and constructed a toilet with proper drainage facilities in their home, Mr. White said. The family’s monthly repayment is around 1,200 rupees ($18). The average interest rate is 18 to 22 percent. Water.org is not a charity as much as it helps empower people to plan, finance and execute their own solutions.

For the actor, the rawest and most emotional aspect of his work is the response from women and children.

“Whenever you bring water and sanitation to a community, the response is exactly the same, be it in India or Haiti or anywhere,” he said. “There is absolute elation and joy. You sit down and interview people and hear about the changes in their lives, the dramatic impact.”

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Private tankers carrying drinking water in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, on June 10, 2006.

The development aid organization sees women as vehicles of change.

“It’s no secret that if you really want to affect the greatest change, you need women,” Mr. Damon said. “Maybe I’m biased because I have four daughters. But girls are better.”

He recalled an interaction with a 13-year-old girl from Haiti who, before the organization’s intervention, would spend three hours a day collecting and hauling water for her family. He asked her what she was going to do with the free time.

“I asked her if she was going to get more time for homework, and she said, ‘I don’t need more time for homework. I’m the smartest in my class,’” he recalled. “And she said this in a way that I knew she was the smartest in her class. She said, ‘I’m going to play.’ I realized that the girl was the same age as my oldest daughter.”

Mr. White said that almost 90 percent of the borrowers are women.

“It’s interesting, because though India is patriarchal, I see so many strong women here; the leadership they exhibit especially when it comes to health, hygiene, water and sanitation.”

The two men met in New York in 2008 at the Clinton Global Initiative and officially launched Water.org the next year when the actor merged his nonprofit, H2O Africa, with WaterPartners, an organization that Gary White cofounded in 1990.

“H2O Africa was something we created to try identify smaller NGOs that were doing good work. But as I started digging into the water issue, I realized that that wasn’t really the solution,” Mr. Damon said. He wanted to take a more sophisticated and sustainable approach, and started looking for people who were experts in this field. “That’s what led me to Gary.”

Water.org works with local communities, NGOs and municipal authorities in developing nations such as India, Bangladesh, Haiti, Ethiopia and Kenya. What sets it apart from the majority of nonprofit organizations is its operational model and a system called Water Credit, which Mr. White had launched in India in 2007 by partnering with microfinance institutions. Initially, it was a challenge because microfinance institutions did not believe that this was an income-generating market. The organization corrected this misconception by providing microfinance institutions grants to undertake market research and prove to themselves that there is a demand in this sector, launch a new portfolio, and hire experts to administer the loans.

Prashanth Vishwanathan for The New York Times Toilets constructed on wooden stilts in Shivaji Nagar area in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on May 22, 2012.

This model has the power to eliminate loan sharks and middlemen. One woman they met in Bangalore had gone to a money lender and was paying a 125 percent interest on her loan.

“People are willing to do these extraordinary things for the dignity of a toilet,” Mr. White said. “We jumpstart the market. Once we provide them with that support, microfinance institutions can borrow from commercial banks and then reach out to those in need.”

The immediate hurdle is the rising cost of capital. “We really hope that we can find ways to bring water and sanitation into the priority lending sector,” he said.

For Mr. Damon, the most challenging part is drumming up awareness and publicity because Americans typically can’t relate to the problem of not having access to water. The fact that a child dies every 21 seconds because of lack of access to clean water seems to register with people, the actor said, but he admitted that creating awareness is a hurdle.

“Gary and I are still trying to figure out how to make it land with people,” he said. “In America, people have never met anybody who could not go to the kitchen sink for a glass of water.”

Clean water and sanitation issues simply do not have the same resonance as war, starvation, malnutrition and other evils that the poor are most vulnerable to.

“Americans can relate to something like HIV/AIDs personally,” Mr. Damon said. “You may know people who have HIV, but you don’t know any children who died because they had diarrhea in America.”

Rather than preaching to the masses, he uses humor to get the message across. So earlier this year, he staged a mock press conference and announced that he was going on a toilet strike until every person in the world had access to clean water and sanitation. The video was part of a well thought-out campaign. Mr. Damon’s friends, including Bono and Richard Branson, joined the strike.

“It was very nice of them because mind you, not going to the toilet is very painful,” he said.

There is a quiet intensity in Mr. Damon’s and Mr. White’s determination to expand the reach of Water.org. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship â€" Mr. White’s expertise and Mr. Damon’s star power â€" fueled by their common concern for a problem that affects 780 million people across the world.

Anjali Thomas is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist. Ms. Thomas recently graduated from the Columbia Journalism School and has worked at The Times of India and Daily News and Analysis in Mumbai.