Gary White

Gary White did not come to water through finance, and he is quick to tell you so. As he put it on the show, he is not a finance guy by training and holds three engineering degrees, and that engineering mindset is exactly what set him on the path he is still on today. He started in 1990 with an NGO called WaterPartners that did what most water charities did at the time, raise philanthropy, drill a well, give the project away, and move on to the next village. But when he held that solution up against the size of the problem, the math fell apart fast. There was simply no way charity could drill enough wells to reach the roughly two billion people living without safe water, and that gap is what pushed him to look for a financing model instead of a donation model.

Gary White's answer was to stop treating poor families as charity cases and start treating them as customers who could be financed. The insight, which he openly credits to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and the microfinance movement ("we're standing on his shoulders," he says), became WaterCredit, small affordable loans that let a woman living in poverty pay for a household water tap or a toilet rather than wait for a free well that may never come. The demand was real, because once a family has water at home they stop buying it from expensive vendors, they save money, and many of them start small businesses. To date WaterCredit has mobilised about one billion dollars in capital and supported more than 4.9 million loans, and the network of 140 microfinance institutions he describes mostly markets itself, because the lenders who try it tell other lenders.

Gary White then took the same logic up the capital stack. In 2017 he and Matt Damon launched WaterEquity, an impact-investment asset manager that lets professional investors put money into water and sanitation across emerging markets and earn a return while doing it, which is exactly the kind of capital gap that the rest of the water sector keeps running into. By early 2024 WaterEquity had deployed more than 360 million dollars across four funds, and the fourth one is the proof point Gary is proudest of, because the investors were not foundations writing cheques out of guilt. They were Fortune 100 companies (Starbucks, Ecolab, Reckitt, Caterpillar and Dow among them) putting balance-sheet money into water resilience for a financial return. When companies that size start treating water access for the poor as an asset class rather than a donation line, the thesis Gary spent decades building has essentially been validated.

Gary White is careful about what this model is not. He is firmly against privatising water itself, the kind of deal that hands a public resource to a private operator, and calls it one of the wrong ways to solve this problem. Yet he also argues that water cannot simply be free for everyone, because a resource with no price is a resource nobody conserves, so the real job is to price it in a way that still protects the people who can least afford it. That tension, between water as a human right and water as something that has to be paid for, is the needle he has spent his whole career trying to thread, and it is why his best advice to founders is to get outside your own domain. He started going to TED years ago, he says, not to meet other water people but to meet people running completely different businesses, because that is where the financing ideas came from.

“There is immense value being created for poor women when they get access to water. They're starting businesses, they're saving a lot of money if they're buying water from vendors. So there is value being created. And what do investors need? They need to invest in things that are going to return.”

Gary White co-wrote the story of all this with Matt Damon in their 2022 book The Worth of Water, and the title is the whole thesis in three words: water has a worth, and once you can prove it, capital follows. You can hear him lay it out himself in his (don’t) Waste Water interview below.