G2CE

From Google to Charity Entrepreneurship

Farewell Google, Hello Charity Entrepreneurship

1 July 2023

I'm leaving Google — yesterday was my official last day after 15½ years, though I've had the last month off to reorient, travel, entertain the kids, write blog posts, etc. On announcing my resignation, I received a mixture of surprise, baffled looks and praise when I told colleagues that I was going to "join a startup incubator program, but not for tech startups — it's for charity startups, ones that strive for highly cost-effective impact". Eyebrows raised further when I didn't have a straightforward answer to "So what's your charity going to do?".

In this series of posts, I'll provide a view into my new path with Charity Entrepreneurship, my thinking underlying it, and a few things that I learn along the way. I write with an anticipated audience of folks that I've worked with at or in partnership with Google, others in Big Tech, and anyone else who is curious and may be interested in a similar change themselves.

The last 15 years in a sentence: Building Google's technology partnerships, from pre-smartphone apps (Google Maps before phones had GPS, or touchscreens), through web search & ads syndication, a dabble in Google Analytics, then early Android (v1.6 Donut was the latest hotness) on phones (good times with Sony Ericsson), onto Automotive from ~2013, first with Android Auto, then Android Automotive OS, then Google Automotive Services (Polestar 2 being a pretty awesome launch device!).

Looking ahead: Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) is a meta-charity (realizing positive impact indirectly through others) that fosters creation of new charities with a strong focus on highly cost-effective measurable impact. CE conduct extensive research into high-potential niches for new charities to maximally save/improve lives for a budget. They target problems that are significant in scale, reasonably tractable, yet neglected by existing governments, charities and other organizations. With a shortlist of strong opportunities, Charity Entrepreneurship identifies individuals who, with significant training and support, can co-found organisations to put the ideas into action. I'm one of those aspiring co-founders, starting the CE Incubation Program next month in a cohort focused on Global Health & Development.

One might reasonably question what qualifies me to start a new charity. Clearly there are going to be significant gaps in my expertise in the domain of Global Health and Development. To turn it around however, how many people do have cutting-edge expertise in, say oral rehydration solution distribution networks or advocacy for funding development of new antimicrobials, and the broader skills, drive & circumstances to build an organisation to address these neglected needs? CE's approach is to start with generalists and support them with lessons learned from previous charitable endeavours, and networks of domain experts, mentors, funders, etc. Their excellent track record really emphasizes the strength of the model and the awesomeness of the opportunity!

So the next months are pretty clearly mapped out — the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program — but beyond that, much is uncertain. "Plan A" is to establish a co-founder match with one of the 9 other program participants and mutually with one of 6 charity ideas; build-out a detailed plan and proposal for funding; then within the month post-program successfully pitch-for and receive seed funding to cover the first year. Of course it may not work out quite that way: I'd be lying if I claimed to have a well-formed Plan B at this stage, but I hope, if applicable, to discover aligned opportunities during/after the program that don't pivot too far from the high impact Plan A path.

More why I'm doing this, what the Incubation Program entails, and other reflections in subsequent notes.

More about the Incubation Program

3 July 2023

So I'll soon be a part of the Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) Incubation Program. The Program has 2 primary inputs:

Given these inputs — and a proven program of training, activities, mentorship, seed funding network, and more — the Incubation Program aims to foster creation of several new charities, mostly with pairs of co-founders, with detailed plans and seed funding secured to cover the first 6–12 months of operation.

The main program is 8–10 weeks, with 2 mandatory London weeks, and a further 2 optional/recommended London weeks, with the rest attended remotely. Zoom/Meet/etc are used heavily.

Things already kicked-off in June with a pre-program month of weekly book club sessions to cover intro-level How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit and detailed research reports on the targeted charity ideas. The ideas include:

  1. Scaling up Oral Rehydration Solution and zinc co-packs for the treatment of diarrhea in under-5-year-olds.
  2. Policy advocacy for subscription models to drive the production of new antimicrobials.
  3. Direct distribution of family planning products and information (already started in Nigeria).

(Plus 3 more omitted here for brevity.)

The first 5 weeks of the program proper are focussed on establishing both a co-founder and idea match. Building a new organisation in a demanding domain with inevitable substantial gaps in cofounders' collective experience is a big deal — and these co-founder pairings are reportedly the biggest predictor of the charity's success or lack thereof. It's especially challenging when we've only known each other for a few weeks, so a lot of effort, thought & energy goes into that. (CE's selection process, which whittled-down ~1000 applicants to 10 participants, means we're likely to be value-aligned despite being a diverse group.)

Matching with the ideas is clearly also crucial, though perhaps simpler for each of us to gauge degrees of interest, relevant prior experience, logistical considerations, etc. While we all no doubt have an inkling of preference at this stage, a significant part of the mindset is that the end impact (lives saved/improved) is the motivator more than an intervention for its own sake.

Weeks 6–8 are then focussed upon fleshing out the charity proposal (for seed funding application) and CE providing guidance through the first few weeks of the fledgling charity's existence. CE's network of seed funders review proposals in Week 9 and in Week 10 provide a yes/no on providing funding to cover approximately the first year of the charity's operation. (Funding thereafter may come from the same source, but it may well be extended by foundation or high-net-worth individual support; direct Government support being unlikely in the early years.)

In terms of location of the new organisation, this is determined by the cofounders. My default is "remote-first", but making sure we have regular in-person time — whether that's monthly/more/less depending on co-founder location and other logistical factors. One possible configuration is a Europe/UK base (near CE support, funders, network) plus 1+ bases in the target countries (if it's a direct delivery intervention, eg. ideas 1 & 3 above).

Exciting to think that all-being-well I'll be co-founding a high impact charity startup in 6 weeks' time!

Why?

6 July 2023

Why walk away from a lucrative job with a great employer to do something highly uncertain for a lot less money?

There's 4 broad factors that combined to make a clear decision.

1. A general desire to have a greater positive impact in the world.

Perhaps it's a function of age, or having kids, reaching a pretty comfortable place in life, or gradually becoming a "better person" in some way, but working long weeks to further the interests of a mega-corp felt decreasingly meaningful.

I'm not cynical enough to characterise worker drones delivering only shareholder value: Far from it, but I'd credit my recent self, in terms of "things that matter", with no more than being a good manager to a few 10s of people, a collaborative co-worker/partner to 50–100 more, and enabling some better satnavs. I could do a lot more, and want to. (The narrative of "Android Automotive reinforcing a revolution in how the Automotive industry does software" may have some truth to it, but to-date the positive social impact is, in my estimation, delivered mostly through fewer drivers navigating with a phone in a cup-holder (and associated accident rate), improved usability of electric vehicles (vs combustion engine, thanks to EV-optimised routing in Maps), and early steps in safety-related driver assistance. I've previously asked-for but never seen estimates of lives-saved by these efforts: the absence of quantification says something about priorities.)

I'd seriously thought about a career pivot into "doing good" from early 2020. Pandemic and first child born coincide in time. Generous paternity leave and a large reduction in travel gave me the chance to purge my brain of work overload, look at life more broadly, and pick up an interest in Effective Altruism (EA) which I'd re-discovered through the excellent 80,000 Hours podcast. EA as a movement champions the use of rigorous scientific methods in focussing charitable effort+funds on doing the most good (selecting cause areas and interventions based on cost-effectiveness in saving/improving lives with a universal metric like $s per Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY)). This resonated strongly with me. They also have excellent "on-ramp" resources (EA Virtual Programs) which provided an engaging entrypoint to the wider "doing good" sector.

Altruism, depending on your dictionary of choice, is defined with words like "unselfish regard" or "disinterested and selfless concern" for others. I don't see it as that puritanical. Most people I've encountered in life get pleasure from helping others, even in very minor ways. The resulting positive endorphin hit is a reward. Help enough people and consciously choose to recognise the good that you're doing, and the reward is significant. Compare that with spending life doing some sort of corporate BS for more money when, on the margin, those extra ££s only really translate to a fancier car or nicer restaurants, and altruism is rather attractive! (I recognise that it's easy for me to say this after 15 years of Google money, more below.)

At the risk of gesturing toward moral high-ground that I absolutely do not deserve to occupy, this article on moral ambition (in Dutch; Chrome should offer to auto-translate) gives a compelling perspective.

2. Seeking greater professional fulfillment and significant new experiences.

I thought I was time-poor before having kids; 2 kids later and having maximum 3–4 hours per week "me time", it reached a new level. (Sure the 10s of hours spent on toddler entertainment are rewarding in their own way, but they further increase the need for some real downtime!) A result of this was the thinking "if I'm spending 10–15x more time on work than myself, I'd better really love what I'm doing." And on reflection there was very significant room for improvement.

Parallel in mind was #YOLO. It may be a Millennial's cliché, but we do only get one shot at life. While the Google years provided me with some fantastic experiences, there's a huge world out there with "Big Tech" jobs being just a small part of it. Aiming for another 25+ years in that same vein felt like a terribly wasted opportunity.

3. Being in a position to take a significant risk (financially & professionally).

All this talk of moral ambition and personal fulfillment points directly to privilege. Of course it does. Without nearly-2-decades of tech sector experience and pay packets, I might not be nearly so bold. One shouldn't have to have such a significant safety net to take a step into the charity world, and undoubtedly it isn't required, but with sky-high childcare costs, rocketing inflation, etc, it sure makes for an easier decision. The pay-cut will be proportionally larger, and loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias, but it's a nice problem to have!

4. Finding an opportunity that was an unusually good match for me.

A background in Tech is not a clear match for many social impact roles (with the exception of AI Safety), which might mean starting-over completely career-wise. Yet my most relevant strengths at this point in my career are in leadership, people & program management, building an organization/strategy, etc — typically the stuff that folks new to a field don't get to do. So discovering that Charity Entrepreneurship really valued those skills, despite my gaps in other domain expertise, and provided a really exciting opportunity to boot, was an aha moment. Credit to the 80K After Hours interview with former CE-incubatee Andrés for bringing this to life as a realistic prospect for me.

As I write this a few days before the Incubation Program kick-off, it still feels barely credible that there's a better-than-evens chance I'll be successfully founding a high-impact charity with an awesome co-founder and brilliant support network in just ~3 months time. Let's see what happens!

3 Weeks in — what's it like?

28 July 2023

It's the end of Incubation Program week 3. The bunch of 10 strangers in the cohort are quickly becoming trusted confidantes, all excited to be meeting in person for the first time next week. And the 6 charity ideas on the table for turning into reality are becoming more familiar, in their strengths, risks, implementation options, demands upon founders, etc. It's been a whirlwind.

These early weeks of the program have been largely spent working in pairs (rotating across the cohort to work with everyone at least once) on 2–3 hour projects that vary from ice-breakers like "produce a 10min video on a subject that you and your partner think the cohort will find interesting", to more abstract work like ascertaining personal weights attached to different schools of thought in moral philosophy, through to concrete tasks like building a budget or monitoring & evaluation plan for a certain charity idea. Time is always tight, so there's a lot of trading-off quality vs getting to everything, learning vs having a decent deliverable, going with the flow vs challenging a partner.

The purpose of all these projects is to build concrete skills or knowledge, create resources to iterate upon later, but most importantly, to generate a sense of personal & workstyle compatibility with other members of the cohort — how good a match as co-founders would we be? With each passing week we reach a clearer view of our strongest co-founder matches and the ideas we and others wish to pursue.

By the end of week 5, the co-founder pairings are worked-out. Happily these are not thrashed-out in some sort of high-stakes relationship-destroying free-for-all. Rather we are surveyed confidentially each week for our co-founder and idea preferences, and the Charity Entrepreneurship team put forward a set of <person:person:idea> recommendations to maximise the overall output of high-potential charities. It's unlikely (probably not possible) for everyone to get their first choice co-founder and idea, but a decent proportion should be happy with their matching, and there's often other options on the table should folks look for a Plan B.

There is something reminiscent of a reality TV show about all of this. The Apprentice, but with people who are actually competent. Or Big Brother (maybe there's a more recent comparison — I don't watch these things any more) with Diary Room reflections on workstyle compatibility. Luckily the cohort is full of good people with their ego in-check, respect for each others' strengths, weaknesses, preferences, etc, and who are disinclined towards treating this like a gameshow. And the Program is carefully structured to reduce the likelihood of angry exchanges over who's got dibs on Idea #1 or Co-founder #2. If it wasn't for all of that, TV Show Producers, this could have been your next big thing!

Having been fully remote to date (GMeet, Zoom, etc), we're all together in London for the next 2 weeks. It's really exciting to be meeting these people who have quickly become friends in-person for the first time. To be able to do things like grab a coffee, dinner, beer together or interact without a computer screen between us. And get a stronger sense of whether we would be viable as co-founders. It'll be the longest I've yet been away from the kids — it'll no doubt be tough in that respect (for me, and for Anna left at home with them both!), but definitely a crucial part of this journey. Looking forward to it!

Idea, check. Co-founder, check. Funding, cheque … soon, we hope!

24 August 2023

7 weeks into the Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) Incubation Program and things have moved swiftly!

Meeting the cohort and CE team in person back in Week 4 was a step-change in levels of engagement and the ability to get to know potential co-founders. The educational projects continued (pitching practice, country selection, building a cost-effectiveness analysis), but the finale of the first 2 weeks in London — matching of incubatees to a specific idea and co-founder — loomed large on the horizon.

"Co-founder compatibility 1:1 walks" became a thing: not in any official sense, but it's somehow easier to be on the move for frank conversations about why, as a pair, we might be more likely to succeed or fail. It was finally sunny again too, so an extra reason to walk the streets of Queens Park, around CE's office.

The ample social opportunities were fun and really helped get to know the people beyond the previously 2-dimensional videochat personas. CE have a real sense of community, including weekly social dinners cooked by volunteer cooks from the team: David & I cooked Xinxim, very tasty. Even the commute to/from our Travelodge was valuable time to get a sense of incubatees' interpersonal compatibility.

It might sound awkward. It's certainly a unique situation, forming friendships across the group while simultaneously narrowing-down possible co-founders. But unusual social dynamic or not, it was genuinely enjoyable and a continued great learning experience.

Concluding the 2 weeks in London for the in-person part of the program, we wrote detailed charity proposals in pairs recommended by CE staffers, up to 3 each with different ideas or people. I wrote 3 across 2 ideas (my preference, Oral Rehydration Solution, and 2nd choice Antimicrobial Resistance).

A day later the CE team had reviewed the proposals and put forward their final recommendations — the official word on who's aiming to found which charities. I was very pleased to land my first choice, others also, and a minority who hadn't found their perfect match (yet).

So I now have a focus — reducing the 500,000 yearly preventable deaths of children due to diarrheal disease (leading to fatal dehydration) by driving availability and use of Oral Rehydration Solution & Zinc in high-burden regions. And a co-founder, Charlie, Medical Doctor and Master of Public Health whose many skills happily include maintaining good humour despite working long hours with me!

As I write this, Charlie & I have already spent 2 weeks preparing for our next major milestone in early September, a formal proposal to CE's Seed Funding network with a request for Year 1 funds. Busy but exciting times!

(By happy coincidence, top charity evaluator GiveWell last week published this report on the potential of ORS+Zinc — a good read on how an impact-oriented charity might approach the problem.)

About this blog

28 August 2023

These posts tell the story of my move from a career in "Big Tech" at Google to, at time of writing, participating in the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program — a startup incubator for charities. Click here to start at the beginning, or scroll down to see the latest.

If you're reading this site, perhaps we're friends or colleagues, or friends-of-friends. It's not anonymous, but nor do I splash my name all over it: the point is to share an experience with those who might try something similar — not to come top of the results in a search for my name.

Clear Solutions, we're official!

12 October 2023

The grand finale of the CE Incubation Program is submission of a written proposal to a seed funding circle of folks who donate to turn proposed charities into reality. We did that, funders approved, and now Clear Solutions — a charity aimed at increasing oral rehydration solution and zinc usage to prevent children's deaths from diarrhea disease — is funded and officially happening!

Our website gives a high-level view of what we're about, so instead of paraphrasing that, I'll fill in a bit of the backstory on the proposal and seed funding.

Preparing the proposal

We started the Incubation Program with six 30–50 page research reports into promising charity ideas, and by the final weeks Charlie & I had expressed our preference for the ORS & zinc idea and knew that within the Charity Entrepreneurship structure, we were the pair to pursue it. Despite the detailed research report in-hand, building on that and creating a compelling proposal for actual implementation was a substantial effort.

In the early days of running with a specific idea, there are still a huge number of unknowns. In our case, they fell mostly into 2 groups:

1. Translating high-level principles into realistic on-the-ground specifics.

Our starting points:

Turning these into a concrete one-year plan, estimated budget and funding request, cost-effectiveness analysis, geographic assessment, etc. for the Proposal is quite an ask when one has 2–3 weeks, limited ability to talk to established experts (since we're just 2 random guys — not even a nascent organisation until we're actually funded!), and little-to-no experience of working in those countries.

However, it's amazing what one can find with some online research, talking to previous CE founders and mentors, and making some educated assumptions about how things would go. ORS+zinc as an area of intervention has quite some history, which is both a blessing and a curse in our position (more on that below) — but at least there's a lot of academic research and implementation reports, mostly from 2010–2019.

2. Understanding the landscape of other actors and our niche within that.

We under-estimated quite how much activity and funding there has previously been in promoting ORS+zinc. With the benefit of just a few weeks' hindsight, it's obvious that something very cheap, proven effective at saving lives, and simple to establish at scale would not have been overlooked by the Global Health community for 20+ years! In fact, 2005 to 2017/18 was a period of intense focus upon ORS+zinc by some of Global Health's biggest players (CHAI, PATH, UNICEF, etc). They had a huge impact, but it's also fair to say that the scale-up challenge is far from simple, and ORS+zinc usage remains tragically low among populations of hundreds of millions (resulting in ~500K preventable child deaths every year). There remains plenty of work (for us and others) to do, but the exact approach and our precise niche needs a nuanced understanding. And I'll give our August 2023 selves a break — we had a lot going on, and this particular consideration, though important, was one of many.

That all said, for the purposes of our proposal, the Uganda RCT (Wagner et al, 2019) provided a blueprint of an intervention that has solid evidence and was not already being done at scale. We proceeded on that basis, planning to build our understanding of the wider landscape over time.

There was much to do beyond the head-scratchers above, not least packaging the whole proposal in a professional-looking "brochure". We used Canva as a graphic design tool, which definitely enables much fancier-looking documents (and a bunch of other graphic types) than we could have produced in GDocs, but was a bit of a time-sink. I'd join the cause for time-efficient ugly documents if there was one. But as novices in the space, we felt it unwise to appear "unprofessional" to the people we were hoping to fund our first year of existence (the Seed Funding network).

Anyway, as you can already infer, we ended up with something sufficiently compelling and proceeded to the next stage…

The funders circle

Charity Entrepreneurship, as well as providing the ideas, training and community support to set up a charity, helpfully also has a Seed Funding Circle. The Incubation Program concludes, for those who have successfully paired and produced written proposals, with submission to the funding circle, who then have 1 week to decide how much if any funding they wish to donate to charities' budget requests of $100–200K each.

The majority of the funders act based on just the written proposal, the original research report and perhaps a chat with Joey, the Charity Entrepreneurship co-founder. A few do, naturally, want to talk to the potential recipients of their donation though, so during mid-September "funding week", we had several calls with potential funders to represent ourselves and the cause. The fact that Charlie was living out of an AirBnB in Berlin and I was on a family camping trip in Wales was a mild inconvenience, but with the wonders of modern mobile connectivity, I was able to join video calls from the back of our beachside campervan — blurred background enabled — and look somewhat professional.

Not unlike a series of job interviews, we were asked about ourselves, our compatibility as a team, our plan, and why other non-profits were not already doing what we proposed ("Why shouldn't I just give the money to UNICEF instead?"). The last one is the hardest to answer when new to the space, but some combination of an evidence-based yet relatively distinct intervention, the agility of being small and adaptable, and a focus upon measurable cost-effectiveness won out, while acknowledging previous efforts by the big players. Now, with a few weeks more knowledge, part of the answer is simply that the problem space is highly fragmented — there is no perfect intervention, and certainly not one that can be readily rolled out in thousands of different contexts. So the huge scale and funding of other NGOs does not negate the benefit of an adaptable upstart to bring energy and innovation to the problem, and at the very least pick off a few more of those distinct contexts.

To bring it back to where I started this post, we (or the idea) were evidently compelling enough to fundraise our Year 1 budget, having this confirmed the week of our return from camping/Berlin. If you are a seed funder reading this, thank you! (And if you'd like to be a funder — we should have a Donate button on our website soon.) Celebrations were short — there's so much to do! More on that in the next post.

Our path to Country Visits (Weeks 1–4)

17 November 2023

This post comes to you from the domestic departure lounge at Abuja airport, Nigeria, where we've spent most of the day waiting for a flight to Gombe, northeast Nigeria. Dry, dusty conditions and strong winds in Gombe are causing dust clouds that reduce visibility below the minimum for aircraft to land.

We are now in Week 9 since our new charity, Clear Solutions, was confirmed funded and we kicked off in earnest; and so we find ourselves visiting partners, communities and state/national healthcare agencies across Nigeria. The previous 8 weeks have really been a build-up to this, working to establish our organisation, learn from a growing network of people and organisations who have worked in Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (RMNCH) in regions with limited healthcare access, and building our ability to work in Nigeria (partnerships, government outreach, etc).

Weeks 1–4: Learning from ORSZ veterans & finding our niche

A reality that we initially under-estimated, but that soon became abundantly clear, is that improving access to ORS & zinc treatment in countries with high child mortality from diarrhea (the 2nd largest killer of children under 5 globally) has received a lot of attention from NGOs & Governments in the last 20+ years. There are some notable successes, with e.g. Bangladesh decreasing child mortality from diarrhea very significantly with wide rollout of ORS. However, it was also clear that the remaining high diarrheal mortality in countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia is not for lack of action by charitable/development organisations like USAID, CHAI, R4D, UNICEF, PATH and many others. In fact, their 2016 "Progress over a decade of ORS & zinc scale-up" report demonstrates an expansive set of interventions to build public+private sector systems to increase ORS usage at scale. That the big players have done so much and a huge problem remains, begged the question of what a small startup charity might realistically achieve.

We were lucky in Week 1 to meet with Leith Greenslade, Founder of JustActions and a veteran of the fight against child mortality from pneumonia and diarrhea. She kindly heard out our aspirations, made it clear that this would not be straightforward, but introduced us to 10+ key people from her network, including the big aid agencies mentioned above. Those intros were invaluable in getting time with the people who had been fighting the diarrhea problem for years, substantially building our understanding of a complex landscape. One striking point was that efforts had largely wrapped up ~2018; a sign of shifting trends in development funding, and perhaps a reaction to success in some countries and frustration at the lack of progress in others.

A big nod also goes to Simon & Jane Berry, founders of ColaLife, a charity of the 2010s that set out with similar goals & scope to our own, increasing ORS+zinc (ORSZ) usage in Zambia. They successfully catalysed improvements right along the value chain from product design and manufacture all the way to end customers' needs (or vice versa), stimulating usage of their anti-diarrhea Kit Yamoyo, first via the private sector, then with demand established also via public sector. They pioneered product improvements in co-packaged ORSZ — practical changes like smaller ORS sachet size to account for scarce clear drinking water & limited clear storage for prepared solution, and packaging that doubled as a measuring container: innovations that are yet to arrive in e.g. Nigerian supply chains. Their playbook and open source materials gave us a lot of food for thought, and they kindly agreed to be regular advisors and sounding boards as we developed our ideas further.

Clear Solutions came about because of a research report by Charity Entrepreneurship into the potential impact of a charity modelled specifically around having Community Health Workers (CHWs) distribute ORS+zinc (ORSZ) free door-to-door to households with children under 5 years old, providing guidance on benefits & usage to caregivers/parents. Said report was informed in large part by a Uganda randomized controlled trial of that intervention; Wagner et al, 2019. We deliberately took a step back as we looked at the broader systemic challenges of increasing ORS+zinc usage, but after consulting with the veterans and the primary research, the community-level element seemed to be a relative gap in the work done previously. Perhaps CHWs are the key in addressing the remaining barriers to ORS+zinc usage. This is our working hypothesis and key to explore in our country visits.

Worthy of a sentence: we also created our website (courtesy of Ula at Charity Entrepreneurship), ran a design contest for our logo (which I'm very pleased with), and did all sorts of basic org setup tasks.

Weeks 5–8 continue in Part 2 of this post.

Our path to Country Visits (Weeks 5–8)

17 November 2023

Going from a high-level intervention concept to the reality of implementing it on the ground in an unfamiliar country very different from one's own is a massive leap.

First of course it's necessary to choose which country makes sense for the fledgling charity to start with. In Clear Solutions' case, we used a geographic assessment weighted-factor model, with under-5s mortality rate and total deaths from diarrhea, and current ORS usage rate as major factors in shortlisting countries. This really narrowed the field to ~10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at stability, recent coups & wars, removed Chad, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Niger.

Language was another significant factor: while countries of sub-Saharan Africa commonly have many local languages, it is much more practical for us to have English as one of the primary languages, vs French as the main European language alternative in our shortlist. We seriously considered French- & Malagasy-speaking Madagascar, even identifying a promising implementation partner, before it became clear that even not-bad English on their part, with our weak French, was going to be too much friction for our first country. Selection between our final 2 countries of Nigeria and Ethiopia, both having English spoken primarily/commonly in government and healthcare settings, isn't final yet, but we benefit from several other Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated charities operating in Nigeria to kickstart our network and on-the-ground knowledge there.

Focussing down to just 1–2 countries is a start, but with Nigeria especially, it's necessary to look more closely. Nigeria's population of >200M is ~1/6 the population of the entire African continent, and its 36 states are like small-medium size countries in scale. Revisiting the public health data at a state level shows that Nigeria's northern states have ~2× the under-5 diarrhea mortality rate of those further south, pointing our charity in their direction. Security considerations also differ state-to-state, narrowing the options somewhat.

With neither Charlie nor I having been to Nigeria before, and all indications pointing to work on the ground being difficult for many reasons, our natural choice was to find local partner organisations to work with. We wrote up a Request for Proposal (RFP) for potential implementation partners to respond to, outlining our aspirations for country/state visits (meet the requisite officials, learn about the local communities that serve) and initial thinking for our pilot projects. Happily for us, several CE organisations had gone before us in Nigeria, so we were able to tap into a set of recommended local NGO partners, without needing to advertise the RFP heavily through other fora. RFP responses trickled in, we had intro calls with them, and gradually iterated on more detailed plans, budgets, etc.

As well as helping us with the partner approach above, Marshall, founder of CE-incubated HealthLearn, also gave us a valuable introduction to the Nigerian National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA). Their growing Community Health Influencers, Promoters & Services (CHIPS) program aims to unify disparate Community Health Worker (CHW) groups/organisations into a coherent whole; CHWs in this context specifically focused on house-to-house work, serving their immediate community (vs e.g. working in a clinic). It seemed like CHIPS agents were a strong match for the CHW network that we hoped our ORSZ intervention would piggyback upon. An introductory Zoom meeting with the NPHCDA CHIPS team went well, and we agreed to meet in person when in Nigeria.

All the pieces were falling into place, with potential partners across up to 6 Nigerian states, plus still keeping options open for Ethiopia, so we set about itinerary planning — familiarising with Nigeria's domestic airlines and routes, booking slots with government & partners, etc. Happily for the charity, Charlie is very flexible on travel and living location for the coming 10 months, so he's setting out with the expectation of living in Nigeria for several months. I have rather more commitments (and a desire to be) back at home, so planned just a 2-week trip. We both booked onto Ethiopian Airlines London to Abuja via Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) for 11th November and kicked off visa applications: we were committed and the trip was happening!