As all of Hollywood slurs over the affair of Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars, Matt Damon, 51, multiplies interviews to talk about… the importance of dealing with the problem of access to water in the world. Construction of wells, sanitary networks, waste water disposal, he knows the subject like an expert. And for good reason, it’s been fifteen years now that he co-founded with the engineer Gary White his Water association, precisely to help the poorest households to equip themselves.
Since 2008, between two film sets, the star of We have to save the soldier Ryan and Alone on Mars visits to villages in Asia and Africa to help finance drilling, purification and pipeline construction works. He tells it in a book which comes out on Wednesday March 30, The Worth of water, “The Value of Water” (not yet translated into French), where he explains very well the issue: nearly 800 million people in the world today still do not have access to drinking water, millions of children fall ill because of of unsanitary water. Finally, in these households, 20% of the budget goes to the purchase of cans of drinking water. “Being poor is expensivesummarizes Matt Damon.
“For me, it was just looking at these issues of extreme poverty and realizing that water undergirded all of them. Nobody was talking about it,” Matt Damon says https://t.co/893MMl46um
—TIME (@TIME) March 29, 2022
Why water? Why this topic? Because “at the beginningtells the actor to the magazine Time, I wanted to act on extreme poverty, to do my part, and I quickly realized that, wherever I went, the problem of access to water came up constantly, that it was linked to health, school, the emancipation of girls, everything.” In 2006, during a trip to Zambia, a teenager stopped her, she explained to her that it was the women and girls who went to the wells, and that because of the kilometers and the time lost, they could not go at school. “There, I understood that it was not just a question of health but of equal opportunities”he explains.
He therefore contacts donors and banks to finance projects everywhere. In total, since its launch, the Water association has equipped 43 million households with pipes, toilets and taps. “The positiveconcludes Matt Damon in a video posted on Instagram, it’s that access to water is a problem that can be solved, which is not in 30 or 50 years, but now.‘