It all started last week at NYU Stern’s Luxury and Retail conference “Luxury Lab.”  I heard a phenomenal speaker, Scott Harrison from Charity Water, discuss the lack of clean water for many African communities.  His key takeaway was that water is actually a luxury good for 1/6 of the world’s population, or over one billion people!

Today, the first Net Impact breakout I attended was a panel on Creating Access to Clean Water: a Top Down vs. Bottom Up Approach.  The panelists included:

• Gemma Bulos, founder of A Single Drop
• Kevin McGovern, founder of The Water Initiative
• Bjorn von Euler, director Corporate Philanthropy at ITT

For those of you who couldn’t join us at this panel, I’ll share a few of the most interesting tidbits from their conversation.

• Consumer research shows that people in Mexico who had water cisterns on their rooftops actually preferred to have the cisterns installed in the middle of their kitchens and living rooms — owning this water technology was considered a mark of luxury that gave families a sense of pride.
• The current #1 U.S. priority is removing arsenic from the water.  (As surface water decreases and we are forced to drill deeper into the bedrock, arsenic levels rise.)
• Despite its developed world status, the U.S. has 296,000 water main outbreaks annually, resulting in a massive waste of water.
• One of the major challenges faced by these social enterprises is finding ways to monetize their business to continually generate revenues and avoid project abandonment.

Check out a book that was recommended by the panelists: When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce.

More to come…

-Liz