Water Security: Challenges and Opportunities. An Interview with USAIDs James Winter

James Winter, a Water Security and Hygiene Advisor at USAID, shares insights into his work in international development. He underscores the significance of a user-centric approach to product development, especially in the field of water, sanitation, and hygiene. Winter discusses the role of services in generating income and fostering sustainability. The conversation delves into the complexities of nurturing relationships between the international development sector and the communities they assist, as well as the importance of developing culturally and socioeconomically fitting solutions. Winter further highlights the need to consider potential unintended outcomes when implementing solutions without considering local contexts and user needs.

• 🌍 James emphasizes the importance of taking a user-centric approach to product development, especially when designing interventions.
• 📈 He talks about the role of high-quality services in generating revenue and creating a virtuous cycle of sustainability. When people see the value in what you're offering, they're more likely to pay for it.
• 💡 By putting the user at the center of product design, we can create more effective and sustainable solutions that meet their needs.
• 💻 James stresses the importance of experimentation and iteration in development. Rather than trying to find the perfect solution from the outset, we need to be willing to experiment and learn from our mistakes.
• 🚀 And he talks about how product design is critical in creating services that are both effective and sustainable over the long term. By focusing on user needs, we can create solutions that truly make a difference.

Meet James

James Winter is a water security and hygiene advisor at USAID, where he focuses on developing and implementing sustainable solutions related to water, sanitation, and hygiene. With a background in applied math, environmental science, and engineering, James has a deep understanding of the technical aspects of water management and engineering. He is passionate about taking a user-centered approach to product development, designing interventions that are culturally and socially appropriate, and creating high-quality services that generate revenue and ensure sustainability. James believes that by putting the user at the center of product design, we can create more effective and sustainable solutions that meet their needs. James has a PhD in environmental engineering from Stanford University and has worked in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. He has experience working with NGOs, management consulting firms, and government agencies, and is committed to using his skills and expertise to make a positive impact on the world.

Transcript

00:01
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we talk about the business of water. Liquid Assets is a podcast about the intersection of business, policy and technology, all viewing water as the central vertex of this venn diagram. Today we have James Winter, who is a water security and Hygiene advisor at USAID.

00:25
James Winter
Hi, my name is James Winter, and I'm a water, security, sanitation, and hygiene Advisor at USAID and the Bureau for Global Health.

00:31
Ravi Kurani
What's up, James? How are you doing?

00:32
James Winter
Hi, Ravi. Good to be here.

00:35
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, who you are, what you're up to. Yeah, go for it. Mike's, yours.

00:40
James Winter
Well, thanks for having me again, Ravi. It's great to be here. As you mentioned, I'm a water security, sanitation, and Hygiene Advisor at USAID. I work in the Bureau for Global Health. Right now, I'm focused on a bunch of things. There are things around rural pipe water supply, cholera as an epidemic disease, water utility reform, and climate finance, things like that. Going back a little bit, though, my background was originally in applied math, environmental science, environmental engineering. Right after undergrad, I had an opportunity to work at a small NGO in El Salvador called Glasswing. They're no longer really a small NGO. They've grown quite rapidly, which is credit to some of the amazing work that they've been doing. After working in El Salvador for about a year, I started working in management consulting in Boston and later in London for about three years, doing some work on corporate strategy, pricing, mergers and acquisitions.

01:32
James Winter
But that was all a bit of a precursor to what I viewed for a long time as Plan A. I really was fascinated by environmental engineering. For a long time, I've been fascinated by water quality, then eventually water supply, and now water security. Water is a big tent. But around 2015, I got a chance to pursue a PhD at Stanford University in environmental engineering. I worked on a mix of hard engineering things like groundwater contaminant, remediation, organic reaction chemistry. But my research was always focused on international development, so specifically, in my case, rural water quality and supply in Zambia. My field site was in southern Zambia, and I spent about two years on and off there looking at the transition that households were making from what we call off premises water supplies. So this is something like a hand pump that you see in those photographs or a well, just a hand dug or a machine dug.

02:29
James Winter
Well, what happens when you transition from that to a piped water supply? And in this case, we're not really talking about piped water the way you and I know it, but more piped into someone's yard, something that would be 510 meters away from their house rather than having indoor plumbing. So looking at that transition, something that fascinated me was the international development community. Propelled by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and some other transitions in the sector was looking to move more from these off premises to these on premises water supplies, but we didn't have a good idea of what the benefits would be. Obviously, you and I can banter back and forth about what do you think is going to happen when a household transforms how they access water, but I was really interested in developing some empirical evidence for that. So I was looking at the health and economic impacts, specifically on women and girls, that this transition from a hand pump to an on premises pike water system was taking.

03:28
James Winter
After that, it was a pretty easy jump into USA. As I mentioned, I get a chance to work on their global water portfolio, water and sanitation specifically. I primarily work in sub Saharan Africa. I pitch in on some South Asia projects, but most of my work is in Zambia, Senegal, Ghana, Benin, and a little bit in Malawi. So I'll pause there. I don't want to monopolize all the time, but that's a bit of my background.

03:53
Ravi Kurani
No. Oh, my gosh, that's so amazing. Right? Because I think you really hit the spectrum both in terms of experiences, geography, like going from public to private. You went to Stanford. Let's kind of piece a few of those things together. Right. I think you start off with applied math and applied engineering. Walk us through. I think what's really interesting to see is this through line, right? You were in applied math, applied engineering. How does that kind of fare itself into the work that you did in Zambia, the stuff they're doing with USA Today? Do you see any sort of connection with kind of what you did there and how that relates to what you're doing now?

04:33
James Winter
Yeah, I wish I could say that there was this grand master plan, but I would say it's more likely that or more accurately, characterizes essentially being on parallel tracks. When I was 18 years old and deciding what to major in, I loved math, I continued to love math. I'm fascinated by it. Tragically, I'm not supremely adept at it, but I think having a passion for it really helped. But then I always felt that it's what you do with math that's really important and really impactful. So that led me into engineering. Environmental engineering was something that there was some appeal to because of its connection with water. And then, unfortunately, to be honest, I was drawn to water for what I would now say with the benefit of over a decade of experience in the sector, drawn into it for all the wrong reasons. I felt, as 18, 1920 year old, well, it's easy enough to get clean water with water tablets, chlorination tablets, digging wells.

05:36
James Winter
We figured out in the United States. The science is there. How hard could it be? And the last decade of my life has been showing me over and over again how hard it truly can be. So I'm sure that we'll dig into this a little bit more, but things like operations and maintenance, how do we maintain rural water assets? How do we change the behavior of people who might be accustomed to fetching or treating or storing water in a certain way, to do it in a, quote, healthier way, that external actors are giving them this information? How do we manage that relationship? That was how I got my start, really.

06:19
Ravi Kurani
I want touch on something you just said, actually, you said you got into water for all the wrong reasons. Talk a little bit about that. What were the wrong reasons that you got into water?

06:29
James Winter
Yeah. So I love mentoring younger students who are in undergraduate or graduate school. I love mentoring young professionals. I do see a lot of this feeling of, well, water is a relatively easy problem to solve. Why don't we do X? Why don't we just do X? I would say that whatever sector you're in, there are young people coming up who say, why don't we just do X? And in the case of water, I think that there are real complexities that some are on the physical and chemical side, water is very heavy, and then some of them are on the socio and cultural side. Water being viewed as a human. Excuse me? Water being viewed as a human. Right. Water having certain cultural significance. So I think there's a certain naivete around how easy a problem water is to solve that leads people, idealistic people to get into it for what I would characterize as the wrong reason.

07:22
James Winter
But at the same time, the sector is an incredibly kind and generous and kind and generous sector. I was going to use a few other adjectives that maybe I have to walk back later, but I've had just a wonderful experience with the people in the domestic and international water sector, and I think that by and large, people are really approaching it in the right way.

07:47
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, definitely. And I think you touch on a really interesting point that comes down to basically product development. Right? It's it's kind of like the product development ethos of you end up with this sort of ivory tower approach. I think you said this in the beginning, like, me and you can banter on this podcast about what we think the best way of doing something is, but you kind of have to be there on the ground. I think you mentioned this a few times of, like, operation, maintenance, cultural socioeconomic things. How do you change people's behavior from the kind of work that you've done in the last decade or so and the work that you're doing with USAID? How does that product development mindset really kind of come into play? Right. I think you mentioned that a few times now. But what does that mean, to really have boots on the ground and not have this naivete of, yeah, here's a cool idea that I'm sitting here with my notebook in the middle of my room trying to design.

08:39
James Winter
Yeah. I really like this connection that you're making with product development. I don't think that is something that's commonly discussed, at least in those words, in the international development field. You are coming from a very different side of this. Very different side of the water industry or the water sector. I would say that Stanford is so deeply ingrained with Silicon Valley. There's a whole design school that I was able to take a class on product development. Something that I feel very fortunate to have had access to, whereas most development professionals wouldn't have that kind of vocabulary to discuss it. And something that is particularly critical is something called user centered design. This is now widely applied across the product design ecosystem. And it's particularly critical. Like you were saying, are people designing these products in a lab somewhere that aren't actually ready for prime time to ready to be deployed in the field?

09:39
James Winter
I think, something that we as an international development community struggled with, particularly I'll be charitable and say, a few decades ago, but I would argue it's still continuing on. Now is this idea of, well why don't we just drill wells and put in hand pumps, and then we'll hand it over to the community, and communities will then take ownership of that asset. Should be fine. And it's just such a more complicated process that I think there's not sufficient appreciation for. And so from the product design side, you would then start thinking about, okay, we have to not only think about the capital expenditures and the installation costs, but then what's the sustainability approach? And I'll just speak for myself. If I have a large plumbing issue now, YouTube is quite helpful, but most of the time I'm going to call a plumber.

10:44
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.

10:45
James Winter
If I have an electricity issue, most of the time I'm going to call an electrician. Because if I try and fix it, I might actually make things dramatically worse. And in the development community, there is an approach called community management. And this was an international NGO or even government would come in, drill an asset, build an asset, and then hand it over to the community. And with the expectation that with maybe two, three, 4 hours of training delivered over a couple of weeks, people would be able to manage a handpunk, which reasonable people can disagree about how complicated of a mechanism that is. I, with my multiple degrees in engineering, cannot take apart and reassemble. And the expectation that when it breaks down every couple of years, that someone would be able to remember their trainings from three years ago to rebuild this hand pump and buy the correct spare part.

11:39
James Winter
When you say it out loud, it sounds ridiculous. Yeah, but that was the dominant paradigm for decades international development. Specifically in water and something that I think that we're starting to move past, for which I'm very grateful. And I think if people had a lifecycle product design worldview a little bit earlier, I think we would have come to that pretty clear conclusion a little bit earlier.

12:09
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. And you said kind of for the last few decades. Have you seen it changing as of recent or do you think it's still the same?

12:19
James Winter
It's definitely not still the same. It's definitely not still the same. I think that there are small organizations that are behind the times and are led by some level of dogma rather than the science. But speaking for USAID, we're the second largest water thunder for international development in the world after Japan, after Jaika, and in terms of just government taking aside places like the World Bank and UNICEF. And I can speak about USAID's approach on this. It's all about sustainability. It's not about drilling and moving on. We'll refuse to pay for programs that do that. That's not something that's in our approach toolkit anymore. So that's transformative in and of itself and I certainly don't want to take credit for that. I joined USA only a couple of years ago. But whereas this has been underway for years, I would say what I'm describing is definitely the prevailing wisdom of the early two thousand s and even further back.

13:22
James Winter
And yeah, I definitely think the tides are changing, which is actually always work to be done, but the tides which.

13:30
Ravi Kurani
Is kind of funny. You say that. Right, I think because if you take this from a even from like a corporate mindset. And if we're going to think along this trend of product development and the Stanford D school and kind of ideal, you see that even with large corporations right in the even up until the this very heavy, top down approach of if upper management says XYZ, then it's just going to trickle down. And kind of the employees have to kind of do that. Whereas you're seeing a lot of tech companies and even newer companies that are not in tech, just taking this PLG or product led growth sort of design structure that's like, let's put something out there. Have the users, basically. Try it out and then if it doesn't work, you iterate backwards or forwards to figure out what the right way of doing it is.

14:13
Ravi Kurani
And I see kind of parallels around this drill and walk away or hey, here's our mandate. Everybody's going to do this to a little bit more of an iterative and customer centric, consumer centric, user centric design that really gets the product or the idea that's out there into the user's hands. Totally. So do you have any tactical kind of changes that have happened that you can talk about on how the drill and move on is not done today? Is there more of a training regimen or do you kind of like drill alongside with the folks that you're helping out. What does that look like?

14:49
James Winter
Yeah, great question. I would say that the approaches are changing across a couple of different axes. So like I was saying with community management I think we now refer to it as unsupported community management. So this is truly the we're going to hand it over with 4 hours of training and then move on and move on to the next village or wherever we want to do the intervention. And it's now moving towards something that there's a lot more support whether on when one end of the pendulum this is unsupported community management, on the other end is something like a rural water utility and somewhere in the middle we have things like circuit riders. So circuit riders is an approach that actually the National Rural Water Association in the US. Started in the 1980s and continues today where you have technical experts who are moving in a circle, moving and moving in a circuit providing technical assistance to different water utilities or different water points that they come along and provide that in on a regular schedule.

15:56
James Winter
You can have things like emergency hotlines where there's one technician who's responsible for say 40 or 50 hand pumps in a particular area. They have a really good supply chain to spare parts, they have access to transport and fuel and they have a phone and they act as a business hours or 24 hours hotline for water service repairs. So those are some of the new paradigms that are being rolled out and even in really rural areas of for example Uganda, there are a couple of companies Everflow and Wave that are working on this approach and with really good success. One of the challenges I would say is this costs money. The reason people did community management was it might have been because they thought it was really going to work but it's also because it's a lot cheaper. You don't have to invest in supply chain and a motorbike and fuel and labor costs.

16:53
James Winter
You don't invest in that. Sure it's a lot cheaper and payment for water. I touched on this earlier about the sociocultural aspect of water and some of the valence around water as a good that is a little bit different than electricity for example, and a little bit different than fertilizer for example. Water has historically been maybe not free but in some places quite close to free in the sense that surface water, we use that term to talk about rivers or lakes or streams, things like that. Surface water is often free to access, rainwater is often free to access and even in the when people were drilling boreholes international NGOs were often providing that water for free, not even with any money required for the capital expenditures. So that view combined with the human rights water that's been enshrined in some national constitutions like in south africa makes it somewhat complicated to design cost recovering operation domains and sustainability operations.

18:07
James Winter
And to compound this, rural households tend to be relatively low income. They might have seasonal or irregular cash flow. And the final piece of this is around governance and government in that public tax collection can be a lot more limited. So, for example, there was a great study that Anna LIBE did out of Cu Boulder that looked at the Boulder, Colorado water utility and compared it to two water utilities in Ethiopia and Cambodia. In Boulder, 41% of costs were born by households. So those are tariffs or water bill and 56% were paid by taxes. In Ethiopia and Cambodia. I don't think you'll be too surprised to hear this, but in Ethiopia it was 76% paid by households and in Cambodia it was 100% paid by households. So you're starting to see some of the challenges with economically sustainable model that is being funded entirely or mostly primarily by household rather than being complemented by tax revenue or industrial and commercial revenue.

19:16
Ravi Kurani
Wow, that's like so interesting. I mean, it totally makes sense that these governments compared to Boulder, Colorado obviously wouldn't be able to provide for that. But I think your analogy you made early on of water is this free asset or we thought of it as this free asset before, right? Because like you said, you could take surface water, you could take rainwater. When you now look at the playing cards, right? And with these numbers that you said, with 41% in Boulder, Colorado, being paid by households and upwards of 50% being paid by the government, when you kind of go out there alongside the kind of socioeconomic piece, the fact that these folks that you're working with aren't the wealthiest and then compounded on top of that, you end up with a government that really can't fund or use taxes to pay for this sort of thing.

20:09
Ravi Kurani
How do you build a sustainable model, right? Because you've been saying sustainability up until the beginning, but what does that look like today? Because it is at the very root of it, again, this free asset that you're now trying to monetize.

20:22
James Winter
Yeah, and thank you for that question, Robbie. I don't want to be doom and gloom because there is so much exciting work and very progressive work that's going on in this. So I think it comes down to two things. One, higher levels of service lead to higher willingness to pay. And two, access to private finance being something that has historically not been leveraged but is now really starting to enter the fold in a real way. So starting with higher levels of service and willingness to pay, when people have access to, let's say, a low quality water supply situation, a pike water scheme that's intermittent and gives low quality water or a hemp up, people don't want to pay for that. It's not shocking that people are not interested in paying for bad service where if there's a breakdown and takes weeks to repair are you going to pay your monthly fee if your level of service?

21:16
James Winter
So what we're starting to see is, both from the government level and from the international NGO level, a movement towards higher levels of service and especially with convenience and water quantity. This is strongly associated in the research literature and the gray literature from just practitioners that this is leading to higher willingness to pay. People pay for good service. When you generate revenue, you can keep it moving. You can have higher levels of sustainability and at least through this virtuous cycle where people are grateful for a high quality level of service and people are willing to pay for that. I would say that as we transition to piped water networks this virtuous cycle is easier to kick off because it is almost always a higher level of convenient service. It's easier to chlorinate and filter because you're generally doing it from a centralized location. They're easier to meter so you can charge people in a fair and equitable way.

22:11
James Winter
And the huge explosion in smart metering that are internet connected allows a lot more sustainable revenue collection. I would say the jury is still a little bit out on whether rigorous smart metering on a per use basis is the path forward. I don't want to say. I'm still waiting to hear from a few studies on that. But I think that movement towards higher levels of service leading to higher levels of willingness to pay is really galvanizing sustainable water services even in very rural areas. And then the second piece is when you are barely breaking even. Only household tariffs are being used to fund it and there's limited public taxation. Getting capital to expand services is really difficult. In California when I was living there, we voted on resolutions, ballot initiatives all the time to sell bonds to raise money for water utilities. In Kampala, in Lusaka, that's rare, if not impossible.

23:11
James Winter
But something that USAID and other development partners like the World Bank are working on is helping utilities raise funds from commercial finance and other private sources of finance. So think like banks, especially local banks, because when you think about borrowing money in an international currency there are some real challenges, especially recently given how strong the dollar is by doing some capacity building and training on both the water utility side and also on the banks local bank side. What we're hoping is to allow these water utilities to raise money from local financial institutions and local currency to expand their operations and just have that type of working capital and capital to invest that they haven't historically had access to. And I want to give a brief plug for a program I'm working with at USA Washbin, two Wash Finance and it's working in a couple of countries in Ghana, India and Kenya right now.

24:11
James Winter
And hoping to expand to a bunch of other countries in South Asia, southeast Asia and South Northern Africa, helping water utilities raise that financing to allow them to expand services both in urban and rural areas.

24:24
Ravi Kurani
Wow. That's super cool. That makes so much sense, right? Because if you think about the parallels of, like you just said, in California, we voted on bonds to race Capital to basically fix infrastructure systems. Two things, actually. I want to go back one really quick thing. What was the program called that you had said Washington to Wash Finn.

24:44
James Winter
It stands for Wash Finance, but it's Wash and then F-I-N and it's actually the second iteration of this program. So wash fin Two cool.

24:53
Ravi Kurani
Really awesome. I want touch on the first point around services, I think you raise a really interesting point. Nobody wants to pay for bad service across the board. If you have a bad service in buying clothes all the way to your water, to whatever it is right. You just don't want absolute crappy service. Right. That's not cool. And so if you can increase the service level of the actual water distribution or whatever that might be, that kind of touches upon the point that you said earlier, right. On the work that you're doing of taking things that work water pumps are off premise and bringing those into piping. You had made an interesting distinction in the beginning where you're not bringing the pipe into the home, but it's in the yard. Can you talk about that a little bit? I was a little bit confused on kind of what that means.

25:40
James Winter
Yeah, of course. So I think the three paradigms that you can think about is you have to walk 2030 minutes to the water source. It's shared. You share it with a whole village, a whole community, and that's what we would call an off premises water source. Then there's something on the other end of the spectrum. It's what you and I have right now. We go to the bathroom, we turn on the tap. The water comes out, and then it flows into a plumbing system that then ejects that wastewater treated somewhere else in the middle. Is it's somewhere just kind of outside your door? So this analogy just came to me. I currently am incredibly grateful that I have in unit laundry, in unit washer dryer. But for most of my life, I have had to share one with I had to walk maybe to the first floor to the basement to do my laundry.

26:29
James Winter
And then in other times in my life, I've had to go to a laundromat. Those are kind of the three levels that we're seeing. So with this, what I'm talking about with the piped water in Zambia, it's typically right outside their door, maybe 5 meters away, they're walking, and it's a tap. So it's still a reticulated piped water network, but it's not coming inside their home. It's coming just outside their door. And it's usually perhaps shared with a neighbor, two neighbors, something where everyone is within five to 20 meters walking, which is 15 to 50ft or so. Not too long of a journey compared to walking 500 meters or so, half a kilometer to access water. Yeah.

27:07
Ravi Kurani
No, that's such a great analogy. Right. So you're taking the laundromat and you're not building an in unit washer dryer, but you're going to have a shared building washer dryer that you have to go downstairs or just across the street for. Really cool. And then you raise an interesting point around payments. Right. Because the whole point around here is like you just mentioned that kind of boulder example of how do you actually collect money to make sure that the system is upkeep and obviously maintenance and operations. You had mentioned the smart metering that's coming about now. Like you said, the jury is not out yet on if it's successful or not. But are you seeing any interesting things around payment methodology? There's been a lot of stuff around M. Pesa when I was working in Impact, investing india, all the stuff with bitcoin and crypto.

27:59
Ravi Kurani
But I mean, I think gas costs and just the energy cost of running crypto is kind of huge. I don't even know if it's useful for this example, but it seems like there's a whole spectrum or a whole world of things that happen now once you can actually start charging for water.

28:13
James Winter
Yeah. I will say it's incredible how much African payment technology, specifically coming out of Kenya with Impecca, are just leaps and bounds ahead of what the United States is capable of. The ability to do any kind of mobile payment, any kind of bill paying, any kind of peer to peer with frictionless mobile payments has been around in Kenya for, I think, 20 years. It's sort of believable on untouched phones, not smartphones. Anyway, that aside, yeah, I think that the payment paradigms are changing to a certain extent. Yes, there's still cash, that's being passed back and forth for different services. Barter economy exists in hyper rural situations. But yeah, I think that the proliferation of mobile money makes a lot of these transactions, online transactions, so much easier. The point that I wanted to make about smart meters, and I'd actually be interested in getting your educated lay view on this, something that is starting to become a model in the electricity sector is pay as you go.

29:20
James Winter
So you pay and then, I don't know if you're familiar with these, you can usually see your meter up on the wall and it'll say how many kilowatt hours you have left. You've put $10 into it, you have some number of kilowatt hours. And as you go, it actually decreases over time. So you've always prepaid for it. Rather than what I do currently in Washington DC. I post pay. I use all. The electricity I want and then they send me a bill and then I pay. And those are two different models. And so in water, we're starting to see a lot more of prepayment rather than post payment. And this is something to decrease arrears, increase payment on time, things like that. From your perspective, do you think that pay as you go in water would affect how much water people are using rather than comparing it to postpone?

30:10
Ravi Kurani
You know, it's kind of funny. I'm actually drawing analogy to cell phone usage, right? You have like two different cell phone models and you see this in the US. You have Boost Mobile, which is a pay as you go thing. You top up so many gigabytes of data that you can use and so many minutes that you can call. Or you have an at and T unlimited plan that's a certain fixed amount. And then if you go over, you go ahead and pay an overage for that. I think it's a little bit of a two sided coin because on the Boost Mobile side, they end up making more per gigabyte of data transmission than does an at and T because an at and T can bulk it. But they end up having volume because they're selling a bunch of these plans that are monthly in nature.

30:56
Ravi Kurani
But the per cost for Boost Mobile for the end user is obviously higher because you're kind of paying as you go. But the kind of beauty of it is you end up with this sort of economics of these top up plans, right? And so you can then top up on a kind of lower basis or a more larger basis, where you get economies of scale, depending on if I want 10GB or 1GB. I'll pay a buck for a gigabyte if I just get one, or I'll maybe get some sort of a discount for ten. I'll pay $9 for that. In terms of usage. What I've noticed to your question on a pay as you go versus something that you pay post is that you actually end up being more mindful of your usage because you pay for a certain amount, and then you see the dial going down versus the other way around where you just get the bill at the end of the month.

31:46
Ravi Kurani
And so that would kind of be my initial take at what I think the psychology would be.

31:50
James Winter
Yeah. And there's no right or wrong answer. I think the jury is very much still out. If any of your listeners know what the answer is, they should definitely reach out to us about it. I agree that there's definitely a psychological component of paying with cash versus paying with a credit card. That's been well studied. And one of my concerns is that if we move very far in the direction of everything is smart metered. The common idea is you have an ATM card or a token physical token or a digital token and you swipe it every time you want water. Is that going to affect how people approach the waterpoint? Is it viewed in a different way? I saw one study, it was very small, and I won't name the provider because I think they were doing a great job on the project. But they installed pipe water points that were, again, maybe 10 meters away from people's houses.

32:39
James Winter
They fitted them with these smart meters, and they saw almost no usage out of this brand new pipe water system that was convenient and high quality. People were unwilling to take that small couple of pennies hit for water extraction when they could go elsewhere for free water. Because you have this issue with water sources, with competing water sources all the time, where there might be a stream or a lake, something seasonal that can complement this engineered water solution.

33:10
Ravi Kurani
Sure.

33:11
James Winter
So it's something that I am actively thinking about. It's something where we always have to be careful about how the pendulum swings if we're moving all the way towards these smart meters, how that affects water consumption. Because one of the goals that we have is especially in areas that don't have acute water scarcity, which is most places, even in sub Saharan Africa, even in the Sahel region, which is just south of the Sahara Desert. Even in these areas, there's often not an acute water stress. If you're able to access groundwater in addition to surface water, So we don't really want to encourage people to really be sucking themselves dry in the amount of water that they use. We want them to be using it for consumption, for cooking with clean water, for washing their hands more frequently, things like that. We want to be encouraging that.

33:59
James Winter
So it's something that's on my mind of one of the potential downsides of water technology.

34:06
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. And I think that ties back to the kind of first conversation were having of there are unintended implications or unintended consequences of just kind of implementing these sort of solutions across the board and we don't know how any of this stuff's really going to move. And it is kind of really interesting seeing how that does move forward. I think we do know that at the root cause or the first principles of this is the largest killer around the world is through diarrhea and Dysentery, right. Of which water is the main vector. And so if we could somehow make a nudge to move the needle away from that, I think it does then obviously make move in the right direction versus the other. But entirely. I do think you raise a really interesting point, which they talk about a lot at the D school, actually too.

34:53
James Winter
Yeah.

34:54
Ravi Kurani
The unintended consequence of technology.

34:57
James Winter
Something that I'd be interested your thoughts are on. You're very deeply entrenched in the water technology space and are looking at you're reading the same news stories I do about challenges in water access and water security. I'm curious what you think are some of the applications that you think of in terms of water technology for things around water access and water security?

35:21
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that's actually a great question. My previous history was actually india, where I was an associate at a small venture capital fund. And part of actually what my company does outside of this podcast is we make water sensors to measure water chemistry. And one of the biggest things we actually noted was obviously water is used in a multitude of applications, right? It's used in agriculture, it's used in drinking water, it's used in swimming pools. And the initial baseline water parameters are a big indicator of what you need to do to treat the water, to then actually use it for that particular purpose. And so my first, actually, piece always starts off with, do you know what the quality of the water is? Do you know what the initial starting parameters of the water? What's the PH, what's the nitrates, what's the phosphates? So you can make sure to more efficiently grow your grapes or grow your wheat or grow your corn, because those also require a certain cycle and you'll put certain nutrients in the ground, whether it be organic or commercial fertilizers, which again, has its whole totally different implication.

36:24
Ravi Kurani
But I kind of always start off with the sensing side. And then once you can kind of understand that, then I would build the building blocks up from there of figuring out then how do you basically monetize it? How do you put in solutions to figure out how much you're using quality quantity, and then kind of from there on forward. But yeah, I always go back to sensing and water parameters at the very beginning.

36:43
James Winter
Yeah, it's interesting hearing that. And obviously your background is in water quality and especially the water chemistry. And I think that to the extent that I do water quality work, it's all around Bacteriological work. And I'm sure you more than anyone, understands the challenges of Real Time Institute Bacteriological testing for water. But something that I've been more taken with in the last five years or so is more around the water security and water quantity science. So I think some of our interests and work are really good complements in some ways. In 2018, I was living in Zambia at the time, and that was when Cape Town, South Africa was counting down to their day zero. Cape Town, for those who haven't visited, is a very beautiful, highly developed, very modern city. And they gotten to the point where non critical infrastructure, so school, not schools, not hospitals, but even households, were starting to have their taps shut off and people were queuing up to fetch water.

37:42
James Winter
That was front page news in Zambia all the time. Zambia relies a lot on surface water, a lot on rainfall, for its water security. Also downstream of that is they rely a lot on hydropower. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe rely on Lake Kariba and Kariba dam for much of their electricity. So were having rolling blackouts all the time. I guess rolling blackouts is the wrong term. These were scheduled power cuts constantly for eight to 12 hours a day because of this fall and the lack of water security. And then subsequently, this was actually even more impactful for me personally. I was in Chennai in 2019 and summer. It was June or July of 2019, 120 degrees outside, and the monsoon rains were just a couple of weeks late, two, three weeks late, and they were trucking water down from Uttar Pradesh for a city of 11 million people every single day.

38:34
Ravi Kurani
Wow.

38:34
James Winter
And seeing that level of water insecurity just on a razor's edge for a city so large and so well developed, in many cases, India and Chennai in particular, is engineered marvel. And to have this type of tenuous access to water was very impactful for me in thinking about how water technology can help address what I really see as the defining problem for us going forward in urbanization and demography over the next couple of decades. And so returning to where on water technology, I think that there have been some really cool advances and some really promising advances to bring us back on the upswing, rather than just being a bit of a downer, is really focused on two things reuse technology and remote sensing with water based applications. So, one, water reuse technology, both at the household and industrial level, I think is really interesting. Areas where you see this mostly on the West Coast in California and in Texas, where you take in wastewater and then you treat it to an extremely high level of quality.

39:47
James Winter
And then you either put it right back into the drinking water system or you pump it into the ground, where it can be used as a groundwater buffer in an aquifer and then is later extracted and processed for drinking. It can also be used for things like irrigation as a non potable alternative that's still at a very high quality. That's what the household size for drinking water and then industrial. I was reading this great article about the Bangladesh textile industry and how they're starting to use their, in some ways, toxic wastewater effluent streams. They're able to recycle those and reuse those for non potable purposes and really reducing the amount of fresh water that they need to draw. Somewhere like Bangladesh. Somewhere like DACA. This is particularly relevant because most of their water, or a very large portion of their water is coming from groundwater.

40:38
James Winter
And you see this in places like the Gulf in Saudi Arabia, Central Valley, California, dhaka, Bangladesh. When you draw water from underground, it's these pores, these small pores that are filled with water. And water cannot be compressed. It's viewed as an incompressible liquid. When that is drawn out, all of those sediments start to microscopically collapse on themselves. And if you google USGS, California photographs, you can see the Central Valley of California has dropped elevation the size of a telephone pole. It's unbelievable haunting when you look at this. And somewhere like DACA is, I believe, already underwater in terms of its average sea level for a city of over 10 million people has an average sea level of less than zero. So having that kind of resilience in a really prominent industry, textiles for Bangladesh is critically important. So that's on the reuse side, I'm really excited about that.

41:34
James Winter
There are some regulations coming out of India that are requiring all apartment buildings to have wastewater reuse. And then, at the risk of being long winded, the remote sensing for precision agriculture. Agriculture represents 70% of all freshwater needs globally and even more in some places. And being able to use remote sensing, readily available remote sensing for where do I need water? How much do I need to water? Are there pests or are there challenges with particular crops in particular locations? That type of data that can be integrated into industrial scale agriculture, I think, has the potential to be a real game changer.

42:10
Ravi Kurani
That's huge. Can you kind of double click into the remote sensing around agriculture piece again? So what kind of sensors do you think would be valuable there? You had mentioned where to water, what to water? Would it be just like moisture content and kind of pests, I guess, or kind of what the nutrients are? What does that look like?

42:27
James Winter
I don't want to get out over my skis in terms of my technical knowledge.

42:31
Ravi Kurani
Sure.

42:31
James Winter
This is something that I've seen a proliferation of remote sensing companies that in addition to using some of the commercially available, or rather governmental things from the European Space Agency or NASA that are putting up these satellites that can be readily accessible. ESWAT satellite was just launched by the US. Government a couple of months ago, which was very exciting. These smaller companies with places like Atlas and SpaceX being able to put up satellites for much cheaper are just throwing constellations with their own satellites that don't need to be one size fit all, like these big government satellites. But they're putting up 15 satellites as part of a constellation that can gather all kinds of data about different, like you said, different water regimes, different areas where places are being overwatered, even things like leak detection, where you're having different spigots being left on or becoming defective.

43:25
James Winter
So I think that's particularly exciting as a complement to something like drip irrigation, which obviously we've talked into the ground over the last 20 years or so. And yeah, I think that this level of data is going to be something that commercial AG players are going to be able to leverage. And as water becomes more expensive and more difficult to access and more costly to access. It's only going to become more important.

43:50
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, super interesting. Actually. I have an interview tomorrow with Ramsay from Series Imaging out of the Bay Area, which actually does a very similar thing. Yeah. So pertinent point, because my next interview is actually with Series Imaging.

44:04
James Winter
I'm glad that your listeners are going to have a real expert on this coming up.

44:09
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Cool. I love this reuse and remote sensing. I'm going to have to definitely pull that out when we do kind of talk about this. Awesome. We're coming up close to time, James. So the last question I always love to ask people are, is there any interesting book or TV show? It could even be like a Netflix show. Whatever it is that has kind of really changed your outlook on water or just even in life. Right? It doesn't have to even be water related, but anything that comes to mind.

44:36
James Winter
Great question. I would say that a book that I really enjoyed. You can see it if you have very good eyesight on my book.

44:45
Ravi Kurani
It's called water back over there.

44:47
James Winter
Water by Stephen Solomon. I read this as sort of a test before I went to grad school. Do I really care enough about water to wade through this very thick book about water? And it's very grand in scope. It goes from the various Chinese dynasties up to the modern day intersecting with things like Cadillac Desert, which is that seminal work about California water. And it's grand in scope. I read it. I had it from the library. I decided I needed to buy it so I could have it on my bookshelf for times like this. That really gave me a much greater appreciation for the scope of the importance of water and how historically important it's been about how canal building and different irrigation systems have really governed some of the rise and fall of civilization. Seems like such a grand term, but at least cities and towns.

45:39
James Winter
So that's something that I like to recommend totters cool.

45:44
Ravi Kurani
I'll definitely have to check it out and we'll make sure to spotlight it on the blog as well. Well, awesome, james, thanks again for the time. This has been super insightful and a lot of fun. I think we'll definitely need to do a re up as you go out for more projects and you see more interesting things. I'd love to. I'm actually thinking about having this thing called the Drip Campaign. It's still a working name, but kind of a re up with the folks that we've interviewed to see kind of what they're up to and what new things are out there in the world of water. But for all of these, those of you out there, this has been an episode of Liquid Assets. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcast. That can be on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, and thanks again for listening and until the next episode.