Scott Harrison, founder of charity: water, carrying a jerry can to simulate the water hauling done by local residents. 
Harrison addresses a group of wealthy donors at a campsite in Tigray, Ethiopia. Actually, “private jet” was, when he thought about it, a bit of an exaggeration. Harrison was no Greg Mortenson, the disgraced education advocate whose use of donations for chartered jets (among other things) led to an investigation by the Montana attorney general as Mortenson’s schools in Afghanistan foundered. He wasn’t even Bono, taking a little glamour into the bush — not that there was anything wrong with that, in Harrison’s opinion. But still, charity: water, the nonprofit he started, was supposed to be a rejoinder to conventional philanthropy — the inefficiency, the celebrity culture, the Learjets. Harrison had rented the aging 737 to take the entrepreneurs from Dubai to a four-day event last spring he was calling F.ounders Ethiopia — the name and funny punctuation a result of a partnership with F.ounders, a Dublin-based technology conference — and he was worried that some people might take it the wrong way. Several days earlier, he asked me, if I mentioned the plane, to include its price, $82,000, a figure he decided was “not scary.” (The guests would each pay their share of the trip, $5,000, from which roughly $1,700 would go to the rental of the plane.) “What I don’t want is a bunch of guys flying in on a private jet to pet the poor for a couple of days,” he said. “I don’t want the perception that these tech darlings aren’t like the rest of us.” I was to join this crew of just-like-us tech guys as they headed with Harrison to Tigray, the mountainous region in Ethiopia’s far north, where much of the rural population still lacks basic services like paved roads, electricity, toilets and, crucially for Harrison, access to clean drinking water. It’s not uncommon for a woman there to walk an hour or more to fetch water, drawing it unfiltered from a murky, open well, and then to turn around and haul the sloshing 40-pound jug back home. Not surprisingly, waterborne illnesses are among the leading causes of death in children younger than 5; the infant mortality rate in Tigray is 6.4 percent. Since its founding, Harrison’s charity has worked in 20 countries, but it has spent more money drilling wells and setting up hand pumps in Tigray than anywhere else — projected to be some $27 million by the end of this year. By trying to ensure that the region’s entire rural population, some four million people, has access to clean water, Harrison hopes to be able to offer proof (a word he loves) that the global water crisis is solvable. So far, charity: water claims to have provided clean water to a million people in the area. Tigray also happens to be relatively safe and heartachingly beautiful — making it a suitable destination for a group of young millionaires. “It’s where I take people to kind of start,” Harrison told me in his New York office in April. “It’s Abyssinia. The priests are wrapped in shrouds. It’s sick” — by which he meant very cool. Harrison, who is 37, has a tendency, honed while working in his 20s as a Manhattan nightclub promoter, of taking over any room in which he happens to find himself. Supremely effective as a public speaker, he can be overwhelming in more casual settings. When we met in his office not long ago, he fidgeted excitedly, anticipating and then interrupting me even before I began speaking — all the while furiously scribbling notes directly onto the surface of his table using a dry-erase marker. When I got home from that interview and checked my e-mail, I found an 87-page paper about the economic benefits of water projects, a 17-page PowerPoint presentation about charity: water’s values and an invitation to attend a service with him and his wife, Viktoria, at Hillsong, a rock-music-playing megachurch that fills Irving Plaza or the Gramercy Theater in Manhattan six times each Sunday. “Scott the nightclub promoter no longer exists, but there are parts of that personality that need to be fed,” says Ross Garber, a former technology executive who is Harrison’s business coach. “He loves promoting, loves going hard, loves being loved.” Viktoria Harrison, who was charity: water’s designer before she and Scott became romantically involved, told me that the first time he asked her out, he looked at her so intensely that she was sure she was about to be fired. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 14, 2013
An earlier version of a picture illustration with this article misidentified the charitable organization for which two of those shown work. Gebreselassie Berhe (No. 3) and Gebrehiwot Reta (No. 4) both work for A Glimmer of Hope — not for Relief Society of Tigray, or REST.
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