All of Habiba Banu's Comments + Replies

Thanks so much for doing this and for sharing! I found his comments on the portofolio of the Global Fund's malaria work to be particularly interesting :)

What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting AMF today?

Now you have a bigger team have you found that comes with much more overhead in people management, internal communications etc?

On what frequency do you think about organisational goals and strategy internally? (If you're happy to share) E.g. do you set quarterly goals, think about big picture strategy annually etc

Relatedly / alternatively: In the course of running AMF have you ever struggled with worries about whether you're on the right track or doubted your choices? How have you handled this?

AMF has leveraged corporate support and partnerships perhaps more than other charities do. Does that seem true to you? If so, is it something you think lean nonprofits should be doing more?

Top advice to new charity entrepreneurs?

Relatedly:

Do you think the Effective Altruism community could/should be doing more to start new projects vs funding / staffing existing projects?

Relatedly/alternatively:

What do you think of interventions that save lives in a less direct and/or less measurable way? E.g. funding research into vaccine development, strengthening health systems, policy advocacy etc?

Did you get pushback from people in the early days who questioned the usefulness of the role AMF you could play or your model of delivery? How did you handle such pushback?

In what situations does it seem like a good idea to start a new (initially small) charity rather than supporting existing efforts?

(E.g. looking at the outside at Malaria work in 2005 one might have felt like this was a huge area with a lot of attention from big global health organisations and it would be surprising if a new small organisation could be able to bring something different / useful that existing organisations couldn't)

Bit of context - I've just started a TB charity and am curious about this for TB too!

What's your opinion of the other kinds of work that the Global Fund funds for malaria prevention?

(E.g. At one extreme: GF funds a sensible portfolio of activities and if you were going to spend multiple billions you couldn't do that much better. At the other extreme: The majority of malaria work could stand to be a lot more effective than it currently is - maybe even nets would be a much bigger part of the portfolio)

The global health community seems to view verticalisation / silo'd provision of health services as non-ideal. (E.g. one ecosystem set up for HIV work another separate ecosystem for Malaria, another one for maternal health etc. But if you're ill you want to go to a primary care facility and get whatever it is you need.) Do you have any concerns about AMF's work being silo'd from other health work in this way?

Yes I asked some TB experts about precisely this a little while ago and I totally agree with your take: eventually there will hopefully be even better preventative measures like vaccines but they really do seem like a while off right now. So right now the WHO is keen to push on expanding access to TB preventative treatment.

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your comment!

It wasn’t clear to me from the post whether you’re planning to do an impact evaluation of an existing government TB programme, or to trial a new kind of screening and preventive treatment programme in partnership with a government (which wouldn’t otherwise do it without you).

Apologies it wasn't clear!

Our current plan is the latter: to start a new program (in partnership with the government).

Programs like this do exist in many countries and many regions but we are hoping to show that a certain program can work well in a par... (read more)

Thanks so much for sharing this. Not following US politics closely I'd missed this. It would be so tragic if this wasn't renewed :(

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer!

The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3

I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advis... (read more)

Thanks so much for making this offer Ulrik! I think it is really helpful for there to be a range of folks that people can reach out to :)

I think people's tastes may vary but I appreciated the humour in this post, thanks :)

Thanks for writing this <3

Haha this is a great hypothetical comment! 

The concreteness is helpful because I think my take is that, in general, writing something like this is emotionally exhausting  (not to mention time consuming!) - especially so if you've got skin in the game and across your life you often come up across things like this to respond to and you keep having the pressure to force your feelings into a more acceptable format.

I reckon that crafting a message like that if I were upset about something could well take half a work day. And I'd have in my head all th... (read more)

Just a quick note to say thanks for such a thoughtful response! <3

I think you're doing a great job here modelling discourse norms and I appreciate the substance of your points! 

Ngl I was kinda trepidatious opening the forum... but the reasonableness of your reply and warmth of your tone is legit making me smile! (It probably doesn't hurt that happily we agree more than I realised. :P )

I may well write a litte more substantial response at some point but will likely take a weekend break :)

P.S. Real quick re social media... Things I was thinking... (read more)

I also spent too much time on comments :P

I wanted to say a bit about the "vibe" / thrust of this comment when it comes to community discourse norms...

(This is somewhat informed by your comments on twitter / facebook which themselves are phrased more strongly than this and are less specific in scope )

I suspect you and I agree that we should generally encourage posters to be charitable in their takes and reasonable in their requests - and it would be bad overall for discussions in general where this not the case. Being angry on the internet is often not at all constructive!

However, I think that bei... (read more)

I just wanted to chip in to say that this does indeed seem like this has been a very stressful period for the team.

I cannot read their minds but it certainly seems possible to me that part of the reason some folks could find a situation like this stressful is precisely because they felt that some of the objections and critical comments were reasonable.

The statement says in point 8 of the FAQ (my emphasis)

The way we see it, we rejected a grant proposal that deserved to be rejected, and challenging, reasonable questions have been asked as to why we initially

Hi Rob!

Just a quick note to say I don't think everything in your comment above is entirely fair characterisation of the comments.

Two specific points (I haven't checked everything you say above, so I don't claim this is exhaustive):

• I think you're mischaracterising Shakeel's 9.18pm response quite significantly. You paraphrased him as saying he sees no reason FLI wouldn't have released a public statement but that is I think neither the text nor the spirit of that comment. He specifically acknowledged he might be missing some reasons. He said he thinks the lac

Thanks for this comment :)

For what it's worth, if people want to see what Adam Rutherford himself thinks of this, he has been fairly forthright in his response on his twitter see:

https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1613534548779843588?s=20&t=3cy41nQ9L-8MvljHAn9Fog

https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1614239120552857600

winsome, eh :P

omg writing a comment adding another useful thing we can do = the best kind of positive feedback :P thank you! And I'm really pleased that helped!

And yes I think this is definitely another thing we try and do! It can be really helpful to have a call with someone who shares similar values with you especially when the things you're considering seem less familiar to friends / family. It's really quite a privilege to sometimes be the first person involved in the EA community that people speak to :)

I think that local EA group leaders / members can play a simila... (read more)

This is a very lovely read - the stories about EAG SF and getting the grant are so great! <3

Grateful to have a played a little role in this. Best of luck for the coming year and beyond! :)