Privatizing Water, Worldwide? No Thank You

Interesting discussion - - excerpt below - - here.

Water.org, the international nonprofit co-founded in 2009 by Gary White and Matt Damon (the one you’re probably familiar with), is committed to providing safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries. Among the most effective ways of accomplishing this goal is through its WaterCredit initiative.

WaterCredit—a former Changemakers finalist in the Tapping Local Innovation: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis competition—is a project that has provided more than 50,000 microloans to Indian citizens, and benefited hundreds of thousands more, for water and sanitation improvement projects like the installation of new water taps or working toilets.

Just a few days ago, Water.org announced an $8 million grant from PepsiCo Foundation that will be used to scale-up WaterCredit, which now has its sights set on offering microloans to nearly one million people by 2016.

“PepsiCo, in what I believe captures the spirit of their own visionary culture, was willing to place an early bet on us and the WaterCredit model,” said CEO Gary White. “That bet has resulted in incredible impact to date. Their support has been instrumental to not only Water.org, but to the sector at-large in demonstrating a potentially game-changing approach to overcoming the global water crisis as we know it.”

With a 97 percent repayment rate over the last four years, WaterCredit has been a game-changer in a country whose microcredit industry collapsed from defaults just last year. Is it a perfect adaptation of water privatization? Surely it isn’t, but the flaws of microlending are outweighed by the benefit of WaterCredit in India—where 130 million people are without clean water and the poor (who rarely see the benefits of infrastructure improvements) pay 12 times what the rich do for a single liter of water.

Until recently, the privatization of humanity’s most valuable resource was a Third World problem. Now the idea and the economics (promising the end of corruption and the installation of new infrastructure) behind it are spreading to more developed countries like China, Russia, Canada, and even the United States.