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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:09] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Erik Harvey, Strategic Program Development Director at WaterAid.
[00:00:16] Piers Clark: Erik, brilliant to have you with us today.
[00:00:18] Erik Harvey: Great to be here.
[00:00:20] Piers Clark: The Executive Exchange is taking part in an initiative called Podcasthon 2026, the largest charity focused initiative in podcasting, a community-led effort supported by many of the major platforms and voices across the podcasting ecosystem.
[00:00:35] Piers Clark: Now, the idea is very simple. During the same week in mid-March, thousands of podcasters around the world are going to release one episode dedicated to a cause that they care about. In the last edition that they did this, over 1500 podcasts took part from more than 40 countries, all spotlighting charities at the same time.
[00:00:55] Piers Clark: And that Erik is why we are speaking today, because you are our chosen charity. We're gonna hear about what you've been doing in WaterAid and some of the challenges that water and sanitation charities are facing.
[00:01:07] Piers Clark: So, we always like to start by learning a little bit more about a podcaster. So let's start by talking about you. You've been with WaterAid for 24 years already and you are now 56 as you told me.
[00:01:19] Piers Clark: Tell me, what did you study at university and between finishing at university and joining WaterAid, what did you do?
[00:01:25] Erik Harvey: Yeah, interestingly in mechanical engineering, but very quickly got straight into water and sanitation. I worked for a water and sanitation charity in South Africa, so this was post apartheid years as part a reconstruction and development effort.
[00:01:38] Erik Harvey: Started with delivering a program of work in Mozambique, where my wife and I moved for seven years, first in rural, and then switched into some urban work in Maputo before then joining a technical support unit as was called at the time in the London office, providing support across all of our programs.
[00:01:56] Erik Harvey: And then evolved into the role that I've just left now, which is the lead of that team providing support, as I said, across the 17 country programs. So did that for 13 years before taking on this new role.
[00:02:09] Piers Clark: And now you are the Strategic Program Development Director. That's a bit of a mouthful. Can you tell me what does the role mean?
[00:02:16] Erik Harvey: This is really around a job that's working alongside senior directors across our wider federation to figure out the next big thing, particularly large partnerships, potentially with funding involved or just collaborations, to really make bigger inroads faster, more urgently towards solving the water and sanitation crisis.
[00:02:36] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now, for the people who don't know anything about WaterAid, can you tell me who are the WaterAid and what do you do?
[00:02:42] Erik Harvey: So WaterAid is an international development organization focused purely on water, sanitation and hygiene. We are the biggest specialized organization that works to improving water and sanitation services across multiple countries.
[00:02:56] Erik Harvey: We are founded here in the UK, actually born out at the water industry here in the UK, and have since grown into a large federation with offices in the US, Canada, Sweden, et cetera. Most recently, the Netherlands as well.
[00:03:09] Erik Harvey: So, we worked principally in the countries in partnership with national and local government and private sector, civil society to improve services, to expand services or in sanitation. Very importantly, looking for building that national capacity, that local capacity to deliver it so that eventually we no longer need to come in.
[00:03:30] Piers Clark: Of course there's always gonna be people in poverty or people who require sanitation and water services, but the strive to get to the stage where we are redundant is the dream we want to get to.
[00:03:40] Piers Clark: Right, it's 2026 and the world is more volatile now than it has ever been, both politically and geopolitically. And so the conversation I want us to have now is around if international aid continues to shrink over the coming years, which elements of this NGO model are at risk, and which ones is it essential that we protect and preserve?
[00:04:02] Erik Harvey: Yeah, I think the first thing to say is the level of change recently in the speed that change recently has been just mind boggling. The impact on organizations like WaterAid is one thing, but more importantly, the vast majority of international aid actually doesn't flow through NGOs like ourselves. It flows directly to governments, either through concessional loans or grants, et cetera.
[00:04:24] Erik Harvey: And that impact is immediately felt by populations in those countries. And that just spread from everything from canceled water projects to people not getting their antiretroviral treatment.
[00:04:35] Piers Clark: We're talking about USAID terminating their project within days, weeks of it suddenly that the tap being turned off and the impact that it had.
[00:04:43] Erik Harvey: Exactly. And that speed with which that happened literally overnight finding that they're out of jobs. For WaterAid, that impact was in the regional 20 staff that we had to worry about responsibly letting them go.
[00:04:56] Erik Harvey: But thankfully for WaterAid, we have quite a diverse income stream, a large portion of which is the UK public, and that allowed us to gradually adapt and shift around and make sure that we were not leaving those communities with nothing.
[00:05:09] Erik Harvey: So adapting and figuring out and using the, for one of the better word, the emergency as a trigger to say, hang on, what else do we need to look at?
[00:05:18] Piers Clark: Now, we're not gonna cover it fully in this podcast, but before we pressed record, you were talking about how there's one particular scheme where you've secured tens of millions of pounds in a single program, which is an incredible thing that will impact not just hundreds of thousands of lives, but actually millions, and it's awesome.
[00:05:34] Erik Harvey: Yeah, so this was WaterAid, really engaging with an unusual suspect, shall we say, looking for the new thing, the new philanthropists, the new way to raise money, but importantly, also new way to reach a younger audience in this country. Here in the UK, the history of giving is huge, but then the population that's used to giving is getting older and older, and the use of this world are not necessarily yet fully engaged.
[00:06:00] Erik Harvey: So we've been working very closely with the world's biggest YouTuber, Mr. Beast. And by the way, he does this in partnership with another YouTuber, Mark Rober, who's a former NASA engineer who comes at this from a science based and a teaching perspective of science and engineering.
[00:06:15] Erik Harvey: Mr. Beast has raised millions of pounds for causes that he got interested in. In this case, it was water services. And the deal was, could he raise over $40 million in a month?, allowing us as world trade over the next five years to improve water services particularly for 2 million people. Really amazing.
[00:06:36] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now, just to go back a bit, what do you think should the focus be in the long term?
[00:06:41] Erik Harvey: So, I think fundamentally as a sector and as an industry, the things that we need to be laser focused on is that ultimately we need to build and work towards building and improving capacities in countries so that we are no longer necessary.
[00:06:58] Piers Clark: By improving capacity, you mean ensuring people have reliable water supply and sanitation through their own governments, utilities, and water service providers, if they've got infrastructure and organizations equipped to sustain it.
[00:07:10] Erik Harvey: Exactly, and bringing in additional financial support in ways that allows those water companies or those government institutions to strengthen the capacity and ultimately the flow of money runs through the system and health and wellbeing, which equals economic opportunity.
[00:07:27] Erik Harvey: Which might mean that you're not spending the money on actually constructing new water services or new sanitation services. You're focusing on the capacity of the institutions such that they're keeping what's there running. And it's a hard sell to politicians in the countries where we work, right?
[00:07:43] Piers Clark: Yeah. 'cause they want to build something new, a blank sheet of paper, an area that hasn't got these assets and changing that narrative to here are some assets that actually need maintenance and improvement.
[00:07:53] Erik Harvey: Yeah. They also want the shiny new thing that they can have the ribbon on. Whereas actually taking care of non-revenue water, you know, is maybe not such a shiny thing to look when you're actually doing it. It's hard graft for a utility to do that.
[00:08:06] Piers Clark: You've touched a really interesting point there, which is about people like to make an impact. It's often referred to as the "White Savior syndrome" of people rolling out wells across areas of Africa that hadn't had wells before.
[00:08:17] Piers Clark: For people who aren't familiar with that challenge, why do they do it and what typically goes wrong?
[00:08:23] Erik Harvey: Yeah. From my experience, what we've seen is people in their career, in their lives, they got the money, they got the spare cash, and they really want to give something back. That's great and it's wonderful. But interestingly, often that money is made in complex businesses and complex systems.
[00:08:38] Erik Harvey: The thing I see go wrong is often the fact that they needs to be a complex system to keep all of those services running, seems to be often lost in the first iteration of a person giving, I'm talking about your classic philanthropist network given money.
[00:08:53] Erik Harvey: It takes years of experience and engagement with an organization like WaterAid or others to really learn that, actually, hang on, this is not as easy as one thinks. This expectation that they can just build something and that it magically continues to operate. And that's a lesson that WaterAid has learned extremely hard ways from the eighties.
[00:09:13] Erik Harvey: That's how our charity began, right? Is literally doing that and then learning very quickly that communities managing their own hand pump. When the thing breaks every five years,
[00:09:24] Piers Clark: You haven't got artisans in the area who can repair it.
[00:09:27] Erik Harvey: You forgotten how to repair it. You might have been trained originally. So, we talk a lot about the need to professionalize that part of the deal, and you've gotta have either, not only artisans available, but actually increasingly rethinking because of the sheer volume of these services.
[00:09:43] Erik Harvey: You need to have the service provider that's on contract that's available, that may not be in the location, but has to travel.
[00:09:50] Piers Clark: So the reason I wanted you to tell the story is I have made the exact problem. We've been approached by someone and the business had some money to spend and so we donated to put a well in a particular village in a country, and it all seemed terribly easy and we did it and felt terribly good about ourselves.
[00:10:07] Piers Clark: I patted myself on the back of saying, well, we're not flying anyone down there. We're not gonna have any pictures of us doing good. We're just need to do it from a distance. Then six months later, we were approached because there was a problem on site because of the two communities, the neighboring village was jealous and they were coming to vandalize the pump.
[00:10:24] Piers Clark: And so they needed a security fence around it, and a security fence was gonna cost more than putting in a pump in the second village. And I said, well, why don't we just build a pump in the second village? And it was so obvious that I was oversimplifying the problem. It was embarrassing because I should have known better.
[00:10:40] Piers Clark: Anyway, now let's go back to the focus on things we want to preserve. We want to preserve the mission. We want to adapt to make sure that maybe we change the focus so that we are looking at preserving the assets that are on the ground rather than building greenfield ones.
[00:10:55] Piers Clark: What else?
[00:10:56] Erik Harvey: I think the other things we need to really preserve is the relationships built between aid organizations and communities and institutions in country. And when I say relationship, I mean local national staff.
[00:11:10] Piers Clark: So in Kenya, employ Kenyans.
[00:11:12] Erik Harvey: Exactly. So an aid organization like us, what we can facilitate is cross border communication. And the problems that exist in Uganda may be unique to Uganda, but solutions might exist in Malawi, or mistakes may have been made in Malawi that could be a learning experience for others.
[00:11:29] Erik Harvey: We really need to maintain that cross country, cross national exchange of ideas. Organizations like WaterAid can help facilitate that. And we do a lot of that, for example, through, we call sanitation Water Operator Partnerships. So we facilitate relationships between a utility that's maybe stronger than one that's not as strong, and that's often done on a not-for-profit basis between the two institutions.
[00:11:54] Piers Clark: And in those scenarios, it's interesting because the Asian Development Bank does something similar. I think it might be the same program, and there is a two-way flow of expertise actually, such that even the protagonist from the low income countries can provide some learning and experience that is eye-opening to the higher income country.
[00:12:11] Erik Harvey: Exactly, and I think that the space we've seen, most of that is actually on sanitation and waste management, and there's a plethora of new ideas emerging in that space. So some of the interim solutions and the emerging solutions with much more of a circular economy environment. Rather than transporting all this waste with what is essentially was clean water, contaminating huge streams of water with a tiny bit of contaminant. Actually maybe separating the streams is the thing to go and composting it maybe is the way to go.
[00:12:41] Erik Harvey: Here in the UK, in the water services industry, levels of health and safety are extremely strong and high, and this layers on layers, rules, and rigs and processes. Then we get in the real world of limited resources and where am I spending my money? Am I spending it and keeping the services running? And how do I simplify my health and safety to the absolute basics in a way that keeps you sane, but doesn't necessarily take all the money out of running the system?
[00:13:08] Piers Clark: Alright. How do you feel about the aid sector and water and sanitation?
[00:13:12] Piers Clark: Are we in a healthy place?
[00:13:14] Erik Harvey: The space of investment in water is so lacking, and we see the aid industry rarely pushing their mindset towards what we tend to call in our space, 'big water', such as large wines or water for agriculture, for mining, for et cetera.
[00:13:31] Erik Harvey: And yes, climate change is coming into everybody's psyche, and how do we do that well and protect the planet at the same time and protect fresh water resources. Because you're dealing with large sums of money, large volumes of water, you forget that actually at the one end of the scale, there's that clean water resource that absolute clean needs to be detected and then invested in to serve people. And without people, nothing else works. So it's been a deprioritized space for so long.
[00:14:00] Erik Harvey: So we are really trying to make this point that if you're gonna do it in an integrated way, think about that water resource as a complete cycle as it is. And how do you invest in all of it at the same time and ensure that enough money is going into investing in the strength of the utilities and the systems that keep the services running the system.
[00:14:19] Piers Clark: Erik, it's been wonderful chatting with you. Now, we always finish with a slightly cheeky question, which is to ask you to go back in time. I want you to go back 30 years. What advice would you give your younger self based on what you know now?
[00:14:33] Erik Harvey: Yeah, it's an interesting one. If I go that far back, I'm thinking of probably designing my first slab over a toilet wall somewhere and ending up with the slab was just way too thick, way too expensive because I had the flag factors of safety and all sorts of things I'd learned at uni.
[00:14:49] Erik Harvey: I think the one thing is to be constantly curious. You do a technical degree and you think the solution is technical, and actually the solution lies in people's knowledge and exchange of ideas.
[00:15:01] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Erik Harvey, Strategic Program Development Director at WaterAid, and we've been talking about the challenges and opportunities associated with aid in the water and sanitation sector.
[00:15:18] Piers Clark: Hope you can join us next time. Thank you.