David Lloyd Owen
Founder & Managing Director at Envisager
Founder of Envisager and author of Global Water Funding, the analyst who came to water from equity research and spent thirty years answering one unglamorous question: how do you actually pay for water?
Compiled by Antoine Walter - from insight gathered on and off his (don't) Waste Water microphone!
David Lloyd Owen is the founder of Envisager, a one-man water consultancy, and the author of Global Water Funding (2020). A former equity analyst who has covered water since 1989 across more than 80 countries, he argues the world is funding the UN safe-water goal at a quarter of the pace it needs (as of 2026).
David Lloyd Owen did not arrive in water the usual way. He has a doctorate in ecology from Oxford, but he spent his early career as a stock-market analyst, covering telecoms and electronics for equity investors at the bank Paribas. When the bank decided its next big theme was infrastructure, he put his hand up for water, mostly because his academic background was in the environment and nobody else wanted it. That was 1989, and water quietly took over his career. He stayed an analyst until 1995, then went out on his own and founded Envisager, the micro-consultancy he still runs from Newcastle Emlyn in Wales. The result is a rare combination: a water expert who reads the sector the way an investor does, asking less whether the technology works and more who is going to pay for it.
David Lloyd Owen has spent thirty years and the better part of a quarter-million-cell spreadsheet on that one question, and the answer became his 2020 book, Global Water Funding. It traces back to a 2011 request from the OECD, the rich-countries' economic club, to put a real number on what universal access to safe water and sanitation would actually cost, after he was, in his words, horrified at how much of the existing data looked done on the back of an envelope. His verdict is blunt. Progress toward SDG 6, the United Nations goal of safe water and sanitation for everyone by 2030, is running at about a quarter of the pace required, held back less by a shortage of clever technology than by a shortage of money and of trained people on the ground to spend it well.
David Lloyd Owen frames the way out as three levers: raise more money, charge fairer tariffs that actually reflect what water costs, and do more with less. He is honest that the first two are politically painful, because water is what the academic Karen Bakker memorably called an uncooperative commodity, systematically undervalued because governments are reluctant to charge properly for it. So his real bet is on the third lever. The cheapest water any utility has is the water it stops losing, and he points out that the best networks in the world leak only 3 to 5 percent while simply optimising pressure can cut leaks by 20 to 50 percent. None of that happens without measurement, which is why metering and digital monitoring, the world of water technology I track in my Leviathan database, sit at the centre of his prescription. As he puts it, what you cannot measure, you cannot manage.
David Lloyd Owen is refreshingly hard to file ideologically, which is most of why he is worth listening to. He calls himself a critical friend of the private sector: bring private operators in where they can demonstrably beat the status quo, keep them out where they cannot, and learn from the cases that went wrong. His favourite cautionary lesson is England and Wales, where, he argues, the mistake in 1989 was to privatise the assets rather than the management, leaving pension funds owning the pipes and a conflict of interest baked in. And he is generous with the success stories worth copying, from Chile rebuilding its services from near-zero sewage treatment to full coverage over thirty years, to Denmark running the most expensive and most trusted water in the world on the strength of total transparency:
“I would actually call myself a critical friend of the private sector. I believe where private participation can demonstrably do better than the status quo, it should be considered. Where it demonstrably cannot, it should not be.”
He is, in short, the analyst the water sector needs and rarely gets: someone who can hold the chemistry of a treatment plant and the cashflow of a thirty-year concession in the same conversation, and who keeps insisting, politely and with the receipts, that the money question is the one we keep ducking.
On (don’t) Waste Water
David Lloyd Owen came on (don't) Waste Water once, to unpack the three ways the world might actually fund safe water for everyone:
The company
Frequently asked
- Who is David Lloyd Owen?
- David Lloyd Owen is the founder and managing director of Envisager, a one-man water consultancy he started in 1995, and the author of Global Water Funding (2020). A former equity analyst who has covered water since 1989, he advises governments, utilities and investors across more than 80 countries.
- What is Global Water Funding about?
- Global Water Funding, David Lloyd Owen's 2020 book, asks how the world can actually pay for universal safe water and sanitation. It traces to a 2011 OECD commission and is built on a model of roughly a quarter of a million data cells. Its verdict: the world is funding the goal at a quarter of the pace required.
- What does David Lloyd Owen say are the three paths to solving water funding?
- David Lloyd Owen frames the funding gap as three levers: raising more money, adopting fairer cost-reflective tariffs, and doing more with less. He argues the realistic hope rides on the third, cutting non-revenue water and metering what utilities cannot otherwise see, because it is by far the cheapest lever.
- What is Envisager, David Lloyd Owen's company?
- Envisager is the micro-consultancy David Lloyd Owen founded in 1995 in Newcastle Emlyn, Wales. It builds proprietary global databases of water and wastewater companies and the markets they serve, advising clients that range from the World Bank to technology vendors weighing where their products might sell.
- Is David Lloyd Owen connected to Pictet bank?
- David Lloyd Owen is not an employee of Pictet bank. He sits on the advisory board of the Pictet Water Fund, the dedicated water-equity fund, and has done so since its 2000 launch. His own company is Envisager, and he writes a monthly column for Global Water Intelligence.