Walid Khoury

Walid Khoury did not start out planning to run a company in Africa. He trained as a water and environment engineer at Saint Joseph University in Beirut, added a master's in water sciences, and then spent two decades climbing the operator side of the industry: Nalco, then GE Water (now part of Suez), then Danaher, where he ran the water business across the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan. He calls himself "a hardcore water guy", and he means the unglamorous version of it, because he started as a field service engineer and worked his way up, which is exactly the path he tells newcomers to take.

Walid Khoury became a familiar name to a much wider audience almost by accident. Around what he calls a "mid-career crisis", he started using LinkedIn to think out loud beyond his usual Middle East and Africa patch, and the post that changed things was a blunt question: is desalination really expensive? His point was that a cubic meter of desalinated water costs under a dollar to produce, less than the bottle of water you might buy at a shop, so the "too expensive" reflex did not really add up. That willingness to ask the obvious-but-awkward question in public grew his following into the tens of thousands (over 38,000 by 2026), all of it, by his own rule, "truly water".

Walid Khoury founded Desalytics in 2020 to attack a market most of the industry skips. Desalytics delivers water testing and water treatment across Sub-Saharan Africa, a region he picked "by design" precisely because it is behind on infrastructure and on needs. The model is the interesting part, because instead of parachuting in, Desalytics partners with young African entrepreneurs, injects working capital, mentoring and supplier relationships, and lets each local entity run itself. He describes himself as hands-off, providing strategy and tools while the team in, say, Zambia runs its own business day to day.

Walid Khoury has a contrarian read on the water-scarcity panic that drives so much of the conversation. He thinks the doom talk is a distraction, and that the more useful work is building the solutions that make water cheap and available where it is not. After 20 years he is blunt about the trade too, because water is a commodity business that is genuinely hard to innovate in, heavily regulated, and chronically short of talent, which is part of why he spends so much energy mentoring the next generation into it. You can see how I cross-check claims like these against the transcript and my Leviathan database on the methodology page.

“We managed to make water cheaper to produce than any other arm or bomb or plane or anything needed to make wars. So technology has really evolved to a point that it's much cheaper to produce water than fight for it.”

Walid Khoury is, in the end, a builder of two things at once: a company trying to prove that Sub-Saharan Africa is a market and not just a cause, and an audience he treats as a classroom, where the whole industry gets to learn out loud.