Proposed for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2027 · Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship
AI for Climate Impact
The first water system in South Asia where local people help build and audit the AI that runs it. Public money builds, companies co-finance, communities grade the water, and AI keeps the record straight.
It starts in Narayanganj, on the Shitalakshya and Meghna rivers, and is designed to repeat across the Bengal Basin, the delta aquifer that Bangladesh and West Bengal share and home to an estimated 278 million people, where Drinkwell already works on both sides of the border.
Progress page for Schwab Foundation staff · updated 24 September 2026
Drinkwell is a materials science company. Our proprietary resin is regenerated instead of thrown away, and it runs inside connected machines in public spaces. That is physical AI, adopted by the public sector.
At Davos in 2026 Minhaj Chowdhury argued that South Asia's water problem is not a shortage of money but a utilization problem: the region budgets about US$20 billion a year for water and spends roughly half, and what gets built often runs below capacity. The answer is to raise utilization by pairing utilities with the companies that operate in their cities. Here is what followed.
Every active Drinkwell site in Bangladesh and India, and the Narayanganj layer: the pilot Water ATM, the sites shortlisted for the ward rollout, and the low-income communities they are meant to serve.
A small AI model trained by the people closest to the water: community-based organisations with decades of field experience, households, young Watergraders and Water ATM operators, in Bangla and its dialects. How they train it. The weights stay in Bangladesh with the public partner, so the city owns its water intelligence instead of renting it. It builds on the national Bangla language model called for in Bangladesh's draft National AI Policy.
Every Water ATM in the Narayanganj programme and the Gap partnership traced in one open record: what it cost, the litres it delivered, when its filter was regenerated, and an A to F grade set by the people who drink the water. WaterGrade, the grading layer, launched in July 2026 and is in private beta.
A four-year partnership, with year-one Water ATMs rolling out in Dhaka from June 2026 and sited by need rather than by factory. At Davos, Gap would convene apparel brands and suppliers to fund water where garment workers live and to adopt the same open grade.
SAP has supported Drinkwell's leadership team pro bono since 2022, and EY has backed Drinkwell through EY Ripples, its TRANSFORM upskilling workshops and World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026. Subject to the Schwab Foundation enabling this announcement to take place at Davos, SAP and EY would be keen to support, based on preliminary conversations held during the Sustainable Development Impact Meetings 2026.
Foundation models learn from text on the internet. The people who know most about water in the Bengal Basin rarely write there: they speak Bangla and its dialects, they keep records on paper, and many of them are young. The Blueprint's model is trained by them, on data they consent to share, and judged by them before it is used.
Guardrails: the model advises and people decide. It never declares a source safe to drink without a laboratory test, and it holds no names or personal details. Contributors are credited, and part of the Blueprint's funding pays for their time.
The first Annual Meeting after the UN Water Conference. Blue Davos opened the Forum's Year of Water in 2026 and called for fit-for-purpose finance and basin partnerships, noting that the private sector provides only 2 to 3 percent of water investment. The Blueprint is a basin partnership with private co-financing built in.
Local voices in the model. The Forum's own AI for Impact work argues that social innovators should be frontline architects of AI. Here, the people who drink the water write the grades that train and audit the system.
A partnership Davos can claim. The award put Drinkwell in the room with Gap's leadership; Gap's partnership co-finances Drinkwell's side of ADB's Narayanganj programme. Davos 2027 is the moment to multiply it by ten.