On May 1, Gold House unveiled its annual A100 List, recognizing the 100 most impactful Asian Pacific leaders across industries. See the full list here.
Of all the problems the world faces, providing enough water for drinking and sanitation is among the most solvable. Everybody agrees that humans need water. Nobody is morally opposed to providing it. The technology exists to bring water to most places. The earth has enough drinkable water, currently, to meet its needs. And yet about half of the world has to work pretty hard to get water, buying it from trucks, drinking from substandard sources, or sending children or women out to lug it back from a distant supply.
What’s stopping us from ensuring everyone has access to clean water? “It is a lot about money,” says Vedika Bhandarkar, 57, the president and COO of Water.org. “If I don't have safe water at home, I know I need to get connected to the utility, or I need to build a water-storage tank and rainwater-harvesting system. But I lack the upfront capital and an affordable way to get that capital.” Bhandarkar is on the forefront of clear-cutting a path to financing for those who have none.
Before she started working at Water.org in 2016, Bhandarkar had never heard of the organization and knew very little about how water was provided around the world. But she was pretty adept at working the levers of finance, having worked in the sector for 25 years and headed up JPMorgan and Credit Suisse’s investment-banking divisions in India. Her success and the rise of India as an economic force grew in tandem, but she was aware that the growth had not lifted the fortunes of everyone. “Irrespective of where you live, you sort of enclose yourself in a bubble,” she says. “But it's much harder to do that when you see your own country, women and men, the way they live, and how wrong that is and how unfair that is.”
When she decided to leave banking, partly because it “is all about being younger and leaner and hungrier and meaner, so you should move out before somebody moves you out,” she says, she wanted to find a way to make a different kind of impact. She started by volunteering at the Jai Vakeel Foundation, an Indian organization that works with people with developmental disabilities. But pretty soon philanthropy recruiters came sniffing. She got offers from two organizations, and she discussed them with her husband and two children. When she got to the part about how Water.org was co-founded by Matt Damon, her kids had heard enough, she says. “They turned to me and said, ‘Mom, why are you even thinking about the other one?’”
While her children’s advice was heartening, what really motivated her was realizing how the lack of access to water exacerbated many other problems that impoverished communities faced, especially among women and girls, who use up a good portion of their day fetching water. “They don't have time to spend either looking after their families and/or engaging in other economic activities,” says Bhandarkar, who, with her husband, had focused their philanthropic giving on women and girls even before becoming a professional in the aid world. “Girls drop out of school because they're helping their moms collect water, or you have health issues because you don't have access to safe water. When we solve this, we'll also make progress on so many other aspects.”
Providing water is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Some places have plenty of rain, but it’s seasonal. Householders there would benefit from a tank. Others have groundwater but need a treatment plant or a pump. For many, fecal contamination is the main issue. In 2016 the World Bank estimated it would cost about $114 billion annually to meet the globe’s basic water needs, and annual expenditure was about $20 billion—and that was before Western countries including the U.S. and the U.K. began to shrink their foreign-aid budgets. Water.org’s way of addressing that shortfall is to help provide funds to kick-start local water programs that the recipients pay for, via loans.
Water.org has created several avenues to entice people to fund water access. One of these is a group of five funds, known collectively as WaterEquity, from which donors and investors supply capital to local banks and credit providers, who then make loans to people who need water infrastructure, whether for drinking or sanitation. Bhandarkar’s expertise and contacts have helped mobilize the whole spectrum of finance from philanthropists to investors to put this capital together. “In an ideal world you could say, well, this should be funded by the government, but today there is a big funding gap, and it needs everybody to lean in,” she says. The organization also operates WaterConnect, which offers early-stage funding and technical know-how to local developers to build water infrastructure, and WaterCredit, which provides microloans to families in the developing world for safe water and sanitation.
Initially, some of Water.org’s local partners resisted facilitating loans as opposed to grants. But Bhandarkar believes loans are a more sustainable model and allow many more people to be helped. Water.org declines to dictate the interest rates charged on the loans, although they are careful about their collaborators. “You need to leave that decision to the financial institution,” she says. “If you start telling them ‘Charge X and not Y,’ then you start distorting the market, and they will do water and sanitation lending only as long as you're partnering with them, and when you step away, they will stop.” So far, Water.org’s 179 partners in 16 countries have made 16.9 million loans, and the organization believes it has had an impact on 76 million people.
As the developed nations begin to withdraw most of their support for their impoverished neighbors, Bhandarkar feels the responsibility of her work more keenly. “There are so many great organizations who aren't able to work or whose ability to work is so severely curtailed right now,” she says. “So the responsibility on us to put our heads down and work harder to achieve impact at scale is even more today than it was a year ago.” But she’s optimistic. “I do have hope that this problem can be solved,” she says. “And I do have hope that this problem can be solved in our lifetimes."
Correction, May 1
The original version of this story misstated the name of one of Bhandarkar's former employers. It is JPMorgan, not Morgan Stanley.