Amandine Muret

Amandine Muret leads the development of 1001 Fontaines, and the idea she came on the show to defend is one most of the water sector spent years rejecting. 1001 Fontaines was created in France in 2004 by three co-founders, and Amandine Muret tells the origin plainly: one of them was Cambodian, grew up in a village where pipe networks reached only 1% of rural areas, and met two people with business backgrounds who wanted to attack that problem with a profit-and-loss mindset rather than pure charity. Their conclusion was unusual. Instead of trying to deliver the 20 or 50 litres a day a household needs for everything, they would guarantee only the 1.5 litres of genuinely safe drinking water each person needs, and they would sell it, because something people pay for is something that keeps running.

Amandine Muret describes a model built to make safe water cheap enough that a poor rural family will actually buy it. 1001 Fontaines does not pipe water across the countryside; it sets up a small treatment-and-bottling unit, a water kiosk, directly in the village, treats whatever water is locally available, and delivers 20-litre bottles door to door within a five-to-seven-kilometre radius. Each kiosk is handed to a local water entrepreneur, someone from the community who needs only basic literacy and gets the building, the treatment system, the delivery vehicles and the training for free, because 1001 Fontaines, as a non-profit, subsidises all of the upfront cost. It is a social franchise: the charity funds the asset, the local entrepreneur runs it as a business. And the affordability is real in a way that surprised me, because as Amandine Muret points out, a 20-litre bottle from a kiosk costs a family less than the charcoal they would otherwise burn to boil the same 20 litres.

Amandine Muret keeps coming back to durability, which in development work is the hard part. Plenty of water projects get built and then quietly die once the donor leaves, so the figure she gives is the one that matters most: of every kiosk 1001 Fontaines has started since 2005, about 85% are still running today. That is not an accident of good intentions, it is the consequence of the pay-for-service design, because a kiosk that sells water has a reason and a budget to keep going. Twenty years in, the organisation runs more than 1,000 water kiosks and reaches roughly 1.3 million people with safe drinking water across Cambodia, Madagascar and Bangladesh, and each kiosk has grown too, from selling 60 or 70 bottles a day when Amandine Muret joined to closer to 100 or 110 now.

Amandine Muret says the biggest lesson of the last few years was learning to let go of the kiosk itself. For most of its life 1001 Fontaines thought its identity was the rural water kiosk, and tried to copy that exact format from Cambodia into each new country. Then it landed in a city in Madagascar and built something different, a hub-and-spoke setup where one larger facility on the edge of town supplies selling points across the city, and in four years it reached 50,000 consumers in a city of 400,000, with running costs already covered by sales. The realisation was that the point was never the kiosk, it was the service: bottled water delivered as a public utility, in whatever shape a given place needs, rural or urban. That reframing is why 1001 Fontaines now works hand in hand with local authorities and national ministries, which grant the land, the water source and the licence to treat a kiosk as recognised public drinking-water infrastructure.

Amandine Muret is not one of the three founders; she is the person who scaled the fundraising and the strategy behind all of it. An HEC Paris graduate who came from international affairs, she joined 1001 Fontaines in 2016, ran its knowledge and partnerships work, and as Chief Partnerships Officer drove the organisation's resource mobilisation past 5 million euros a year before becoming Chief Development Officer in 2024, the role from which she now leads its expansion into new geographies. Her wider conviction is blunt, and worth hearing from someone who has spent a decade making one model work: with roughly one in two people on Earth still drinking unsafe water in 2025, and less money and a harder climate to work with, she thinks the sector cannot keep doing the same things and expecting a different result. It is a view she shares with people like Gary White of Water.org, whose focus on fixing one broken part of the system she singles out as the kind of thinking water needs.

“At the beginning in 2005, saying that we are going to sell water already was a message that was not at all heard by the sector. Even NGOs would tell us that we are like capitalists trying to make money out of vulnerable populations.”

Amandine Muret is, in the end, the rare water leader who treats dignity and a balance sheet as the same problem: the people 1001 Fontaines serves are customers, not beneficiaries, and that one word change is most of why the water keeps flowing.