New book by National Press Club member Mike Curley discusses how safe water, sanitation systems save lives

With 1 billion people around the world lacking water and 2 billion people lacking sanitation, the crux of providing safe drinking water and basic sanitation services relies essentially on having the know-how to amass, organize and guarantee financing, and less upon access to technology, Club member and author Mike Curley told a National Press Club Virtual Book Rap onThursday.

After the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, water and sanitation systems in major cities collapsed. In rural villages in Kazakhstan, people working huge collective farms were left to fend for themselves for safe water and sanitation. In Honduras, young boys in an orphanage were regularly sickened with dysentery from bad water piped from the capital city and across Central America because nobody knew how to fix a water system, Curley said.

Curley's new book, Environmental Finance for the Developing World, draws from a multi-decade career, serving under four presidents, on the EPA’s Environmental Financial Advisory Board. Curley led or worked with teams that provided safe drinking water and sanitation services to 15 rural villages in Kazakhstan, and several more in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala as a board member of the former International Rural Water Association.

In Kazakhstan, to provide water systems in rural areas, U.S. government and Kazakh’s central and regional governments awarded grants. They didn't need grants, Curley said. With a good loan, a $50,000 project would have cost 2,500 villagers $1.30 each. The rural village council agreed in advance to collect a modest fee from the villagers to cover maintenance.

In the Honduran orphanage, to prevent the children from drinking bad city water, the orphanage paid $400 a month for bottled water instead of $54 a month for an entirely new safe water system based on a loan of $10,000, which Curley eventually raised. 

Curley closed the event with what he described as “a short, personal story about the quality of life on this fragile planet.” On his visit in 2003 to a village mayor in Kazakhstan, the log of medical cases for dysentery went from five to 10 a day before the new system was built, to one or two a month after it was functioning. Before he left the village, an elderly grandmother kneeled in front of him in the mud and kissed his hand saying, “Thank you” in Russian.

The Book & Author Group meets the second Tuesday each month to produce events highlighting Club authors. To find out more information or to join, please email Joe Motheral at [email protected].