Martyn James | Co-founder of Clear Solutions

Martyn spent more than a decade at Google in technical partnership roles before exploring a career transition, realising that he was starting to feel a bit restless in his career. “Life was good,” he recalls, “but I wanted to do something a little more worthwhile.”

Martyn first heard about effective altruism (EA) in passing around 2013 from a colleague, though he wasn’t initially interested in the space. “I remember Googling it and thinking, ‘it’s a bunch of Oxford philosophers, probably not for me.'” Years later, in 2020, Martyn was at home on parental leave. He began listening to the 80,000 Hours podcast and the ideas resonated. Eventually, he joined the EA Introductory Program. “It was the first time I found a structured, evidence-based path for people who wanted to do good.”

Though still sleep-deprived and caring for a newborn, Martyn kept exploring EA. The first concrete opportunity came when he encountered the Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) incubation program which provides funding, ideas, and training to help participants found their own charities. “It was the only EA-related job I ever applied for,” he says. “And I wasn’t even sure I’d be a fit. But as I made it through each individual round, I started realizing: maybe this is for me.”

He was accepted, and in 2023, co-founded Clear Solutions, a nonprofit tackling child mortality from diarrhea in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African countries. In these areas, diarrhea can result in fatal dehydration, so the nonprofit equips community health workers to deliver oral rehydration salts (ORS) to households. Caregivers have it ready for when a child gets sick, making the treatment cheap and effective. “From a standing start, we’ve reached around 65,000 children,” Martyn says. “We’re really proud of that.”

But as the organization grew, Martyn and his co-founder noticed a shift in the ecosystem. Other NGOs, spurred in part by positive evaluations from GiveWell, were starting similar interventions. Rather than compete, Clear Solutions adapted. “We didn’t want to duplicate efforts just to claim credit. We wanted to make a difference counterfactually. So we’re now focusing more on partnerships and layering ORS distribution onto existing health infrastructure.”

Martyn says his background at Google translated well to this new space. “I was always oper...

Mid-career transitions in Effective Altruism