Matt Damon

And they don't have any savings, but they have the daily expenditure.

And sometimes they're paying up to 25% of their income just to secure water for that day or paying in other ways, you know, with their time.

And it's a massive issue for women and girls.

It predominantly affects them because they're charged with the water collection.

And that means that girls aren't in school, right?

And oftentimes women are leaving jobs to go stand in a water queue and wait.

And so then you imagine what they can expect for their outcomes and how it stifles their potential to kind of live the life they deserve to live.

And so he realized this payment was happening.

And so a microloan could get paid off.

In this case, it's what we call an income-enhancing loan because they're actually buying their time back.

And so it was a theory, a hypothesis that Gary had, and it's just worked better than we ever could have hoped.

These loans that are taken out by the most economically vulnerable people on the planet, 90% of them are women, by the way,

They pay back at 98%.

Wow.

And so the other kind of elegant thing about this strategy is that it actually drives the philanthropic costs per person reach down.

In a standard kind of well-drilling system, it's $25 or more to get somebody clean water.

With our programs, it's $5, right?

It's been driven all the way down to $5 because the money goes out, it gets repaid, and then it recycles and it goes out again.

And so this system has worked, you know...

To put it in perspective, in 2012, we reached our first million people.