For a global audience, Matt Damon is best known as a Hollywood actor, but in Zambia his name carries a different connection.
It was an encounter with families in a Zambian village that helped change the course of his life and ultimately contributed to a global campaign to improve access to safe water and sanitation.
Damon’s experience in Zambia in the mid-2000s exposed him to the daily difficulties faced by families living without reliable access to clean water and adequate sanitation.
What he witnessed was not simply an issue of poverty, but a reminder of how the absence of basic services can affect education, health, livelihoods and the amount of time families have available for productive activities.
The experience stayed with the actor long after he left Zambia.
In 2006, Damon established the H2O Africa Foundation, with the aim of raising awareness and supporting efforts to improve access to safe water across Africa.
What began with his exposure to the challenges facing African communities would eventually develop into a much larger international campaign.
The Zambian connection is therefore an important part of the history of a mission that has now reached millions of people around the world.
Two years after establishing H2O Africa, Damon met engineer and water-and-sanitation specialist Gary White at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Their meeting proved significant because the two brought different strengths to the same problem. Damon had the public profile to draw international attention to the water crisis, while White had extensive technical experience in developing practical water and sanitation solutions.
Their organisations subsequently came together in 2009, creating the partnership that helped expand the work of Water.org.
According to Water.org, the organisation has since helped empower more than 92 million people with access to safe water or sanitation.
The scale represents a dramatic expansion from the early days of Damon’s involvement in the issue, when his concern had been shaped by what he had personally seen in Africa.
For Zambia, the story is significant because it demonstrates how an experience in one local community can have consequences far beyond the community itself.
Water is often discussed in terms of infrastructure, dams, boreholes and treatment plants, but Damon’s advocacy has also highlighted the human cost of inadequate access.
Where water is far from homes, women and children in particular can spend hours collecting it. That time can otherwise be devoted to school, work, family responsibilities or rest.
Damon has also spoken about a young girl he encountered in Haiti who had previously spent hours collecting water. When asked what she would do with the time she had gained after getting access to water closer to home, she said she wanted to play. For him, the response illustrated the human dimension behind global water statistics.
The lesson is equally relevant to Zambia, where access to reliable water and sanitation remains closely linked to public health, education and economic opportunity.
Twenty years after Damon established H2O Africa, his original encounter with communities in Africa has become part of a global movement involving financial institutions, development partners and local communities.
The journey from a Zambian village to an international water campaign is a reminder that global initiatives can sometimes begin with something very local: one person witnessing a problem and deciding that it should not simply be ignored.
For Zambia, Damon’s story offers another perspective on the country’s place in the wider world. A community that once introduced a Hollywood star to the realities of the water crisis became part of the story behind a movement that has since reached more than 92 million people.
Picture: Matt Damon