All of RobM's Comments + Replies

Thanks Ben

I am pleased to say that I was able to introduce a number of the translators we worked with to companies that supported AMF pro bono and they secured new paid for translation work. Perhaps a nice example of what often happens - 'what goes around, comes around'. 

Hi Aaron

I'm pleased to say it's what happened - and across 10 languages. I don't think there is any particular secret here - and I'm certainly not the best copywriter in the world - but a combination  of: a good cause; a modest time commitment requested (a few hours); asking people with the right skills and with some time to allocate;  giving enough time to do the work (several weeks) so as not to create any pressure, led to this large number of experts offering to help.

Warm regards, Rob   

How do you protect the privacy of households that receive nets?

Before we collect any data from a household, the householder is made aware of the information to be collected and its use and the householder’s permission is sought to collect it. No medical information is gathered as this is not required to determine the number of nets needed by the household to achieve universal coverage. The data collected are held securely in a database with password access provided to a limited number of authorised people with, in most cases, viewing (and not downl... (read more)

Climate change is not materially affecting AMF's work at the moment as there is a lot of malaria to bring under control. I’d like to think that with the right support we can bring malaria under control in the next 10 to 15 years before the impacts of climate change make things worse. There are some sensible comments being made about climate change increasing the risk that malaria will appear in new areas and new countries and that would not be good at all.

I am not clear on the water and temperature question. Can you clarify?

To add on to the question of mid to long term effects, do you have a theory on what role bednets play in transitioning a country to malaria under control or even be malaria free? How long after a country reaches either of these two stages would bednets become less critical (if ever?)

There is significant evidence that bednets have played a ‘majority role’ in reducing the number of deaths and cases of illness due to malaria. An article from the Oct 2015 edition of Nature suggested (or stated) that 68% of the 60% reduction in malaria deaths (ov... (read more)

Have you considered collecting data on subjective wellbeing in order to help quantify these improvements? Could that be integrated into your program without too much expense/difficulty?

We haven’t considered this, no, but an interesting thought and we’ll keep the suggestion in mind.

Do you have any data on dietary changes resulting from bed net distribution (or similar programs)? Would it be feasible to collect that data in future?

No, we don’t have any data here. I suppose it may be possible to collect those data but I wouldn’t se... (read more)

How do you and Andrew go about arguments?

I am not sure I understand the question so I’ll answer in several ways. In 20 years of working together (Andrew was previously the head of technology in a business I ran) we’ve certainly had (very) occasional disagreements (for example, should we develop first this functionality or that?; how to go about solving a particular problem) but we don’t ‘argue’. If you rather mean ‘How do we go about the development process?’, we have found it has worked for us that I share... (read more)

Our technology (databases etc) are bespoke – all built in-house. We follow a simple process: we decide what functionality we need, and we build it. A key element is thinking through what we need and how that needs to be structured (content, layout, user interface, analysis functionality etc) so there are two stages – establishing clearly what we need; building it.

I was interested and pleased to hear from GiveWell when they first contacted us (in 2009/10 I think) as it was obvious straight away that we shared a similar attitude to impact, transparency and accountability. I remember in particular reading at the time that they had two recommendations (and I paraphrase): ‘Do give money to these 3 charities. Don’t give money to these 132.’ I liked those numbers. It said to me that they really valued data and evidence and not stories. I didn’t think it was weird at all that they were evaluatin... (read more)

We have certainly improved monitoring practices since 2016 and it’s important that we continue to look to improve them.

The observations and criticisms made in 2014 were valid and it is one of the benefits of independent organisations reviewing our work in detail that we receive feedback and suggestions that can help us do a better job.

An example of a recent improvement is the change in the frequency and scale of our post-distribution monitoring. For many years, PDMs were 6 monthly and involved visiting 5% of the households that received nets. As a... (read more)

Not close. Money. There are significant gaps in funding for nets and our current information is that for the period 2021-2023 that gap will be around US$500m to US$750m.

There is more malaria prevention happening now. When AMF started in 2004/05, 5 million LLINs were distributed globally by all contributors. It is now around 200 million nets per year.

There is a greater focus on data I am pleased to say with funders ever more focused on ensuring nationwide campaigns are well targeted and not wasteful.

More money has come into malaria prevention through a combination of greater awareness of the disease, its impact and what can be done about it, as well as, in our experience, donors having greater confidence that funds being g... (read more)

You are very kind – our website is hopelessly out of date! We are currently working with a web design company who is helping us pro bono and we have made very good progress on the new design. We expect the new website design to be better in a number of important ways including: clearer in explaining what we do, easier to navigate (the aim is 'intuitively navigable'), easier to access content and responsive to different devices used to view the site.

We are hiring a technology developer and that person will increase our overall technology capability that is primarily focused on managing and developing database-related functionality.

I guess the probability I would have ended up doing something like [founding and running AMF] before I did is zero, given I didn’t! 😊 Would I have ended up doing something like I am now had the ‘chance event’ (me being useless with a remote control and not succeeding in turning off the tv news one evening and instead switching to a channel showing a programme about a burns victim that led me to organise a swim for the little girl that then led to World Swim Against Malaria…), yes I think I would have. That is based on me... (read more)

Why not, assuming it can be agreed what is the definition of high impact for animal charities. For human-focused charities, measures include deaths averted and health outcomes improved and I don’t see why the same should not be achievable for animal charities. It is then a case of charities focused on these causes providing data and other information to allow independent assessment of their level of impact.

I don’t feel I know enough to suggest what may be missing in current animal charities’ activities, including advocacy.

1. What do you think are the main positive and negative indirect impacts of the program, both long- and short-term? (E.g. increasing productivity and economic growth, increasing/decreasing total population, strengthening health systems, greenhouse gas emissions, consumption of factory-farmed meat...) Do you have any data on these? Are you planning to gather data on any of them?

The main positive indirect impact of distributing nets is to improve the economy in the areas in which the nets are distributed. If people are sick, they cannot teach, they cannot dr... (read more)

Focus on the data and make sure they are as accurate as possible.

That underpins what we do at AMF as it gives us the best chance of understanding well what is needed (e.g. how many nets are needed and where) and reaching our objective as best we can (i.e. all sleeping spaces covered). An example would be structuring our work to: a) maximise the proportion of households that are visited during the registration phase of a distribution during which we establish how many nets are needed by each household (we aim for 100%); and b) ensure the data are accurate.... (read more)

Yes to the former and no to the latter! We have been able to do more things and some of the same things more quickly - and better.

With a bigger team we have, amongst other things:

greater depth in management talent allowing us to manage more projects, more effectively

greater depth in data analysis talent allowing us to carry out deeper analysis of (larger quantities of) data

been able to invest time in putting together templates to allow us to more quickly assess projects. For example, standardised proposal templates (both word documents and excel spreadsh... (read more)

Unfortunately, I don’t think we will run out of areas in which to distribute nets. We don’t just distribute nets in easily accessible areas but also in hard and very hard to get to areas as it is important to protect everybody and achieve ‘universal coverage’ i.e. all sleeping spaces covered. Often the hardest to reach areas are those that most need nets as they have more challenging access to health care. There are many examples of hard to reach areas in DRC, one of the two countries in the world most affected by malaria, and i... (read more)

Nothing particularly insightful, I’m afraid. I have always been a fan of the portfolio approach to supporting charities given there are many good charities doing important work so if there are a variety of views and interests within the EA movement, that seems like a good thing to me. At AMF, we have a significant gap in funding and of course we would like as many as possible to support what we do so that means we have to continue to make the case that we are worthy of support whilst understanding donors will wish to put their support, financial or otherwise, in many different areas.

Yes, I try and respond quickly (meetings, calls, other commitments etc notwithstanding) out of courtesy and a desire to allow others to keep going with their projects and work, without me holding them up. The speed with which I am able to respond to an email will also depend on whether the response is clear and simple, meaning a quick response is possible, or requires more thought, data collection, liaising with others etc, which leads to a longer response time.

Yes, based on a) if AMF no longer adds value, we’ll stop (I think of that as Plan B for the charity, and I’d love for AMF to close if its work is no longer needed. Sadly, it looks as though malaria will be here for the next 10 years at least and within that time frame, currently, the distribution of nets is the most effective thing we can do to prevent malaria); and b) those of us involved in AMF care very much about what we do and I suspect others might also like to focus on another area where we can make a difference.

We are looking to hire a technology developer and I haven’t come up with a 20 minute solution to that.

That’s not really failing to produce a good outcome, more an example of how the 20 minute approach doesn’t apply to every task or challenge, but I find it usually helps in some way when thinking through how to approach bigger tasks or projects.

Another example is how we have approached managing the post-distribution monitoring reports that come in from Uganda following our 2017 distribution of 12.8 million nets.

130 PDM reports are rec... (read more)

Perhaps I should have written 20 minute ‘approach’ rather than rule.

Sometimes when I wish to achieve an objective, I think about how I might do so with 20 minutes of effort.

It doesn’t apply to all circumstances, but the idea is to focus thinking on how best to go about getting something done and come up with suitable actions.

Actions compatible with the objective.

For me, the 20 minutes begins once you start ‘doing’ something i.e. picking up the phone or writing an email to someone. You can have as much thinking time befor... (read more)

I’d be interested to read more about that.

If other projects, including projects to promote economic growth, can be demonstrated to be very or more-cost effective at saving lives (than funding and distributing long-lasting insecticidal nets) I would be interested in supporting them.

The problem we have today is people falling ill with, and dying from, malaria. Currently, the bednet is the most effective way of preventing that so it seems good and sensible to put funds into distributing nets.

My over-riding thought is that protecting people from malari... (read more)