By Rob Mather, Founder/CEO, Against Malaria Foundation
2018 is shaping up to be a busy year for Against Malaria Foundation’s work protecting millions of people from malaria. We have passed a total of US$158 million raised, from over 300,000 donations from people in 186 countries. As always, our sincere thanks to everyone for their support and generosity. You can follow our progress on againstmalaria.com
Agreements in Malawi and Ghana
Two of our large-scale agreements for 2018 are with Malawi and Ghana. Malaria is one of the primary health issues in both countries, and these nets have the potential to play a major part in reducing deaths and illness.
AMF has signed an agreement with the Malawi Ministry of Health to fund 4.3 million nets for distribution from August to December 2018, protecting a total of 7.8 million people. In Ghana, our agreement with the Ministry of Health is to fund 3.6 million nets, protecting 6.5 million people. These numbers represent 40% of Malawi’s long-lasting insecticide treated net (LLIN) need for their 2018 universal coverage campaign and 35% of the need in Ghana.
Key elements of our agreements include:
- Co-funding partnerships with non-net costs (shipping, pre-distribution, distribution) funded by the Global Fund
- ‘105%’ data collection will be used for the household-level registration process to support accurate data gathering – 5% of households will be re-visited as a check on registration numbers
- AMF will collect household registration data from the entirety of a proportion of villages as an independent check on registration and population numbers
- In Malawi, household-level data will be collected on paper and then entered into AMF’s Data Entry System (DES) for analysis and verification.
- In Ghana, household-level information will be collected using electronic devices. The above elements combined, are the basis for a highly accountable distribution.
- Post-distribution monitoring of net use and condition (PDMs) will take place every six months for two and a half years in all districts. AMF will fund this.
AMF allocates individual donations to specific net distributions, so each donor can follow where their nets are distributed, and we report openly on progress and performance throughout and after distributions.
AMF is also funding more than a million nets for distribution in Papua New Guinea this year. These nets will protect a further 2 million people and will be distributed and followed up in the way described above.
We are assessing a series of further distributions for support and expect to make announcements in the coming weeks and months.
Future distributions
There remains a huge need for nets. The gap for the next few years runs into tens of millions of nets. We are involved in discussions in a number of countries requiring individually between 3 million and 33 million nets for the period 2018 to 2019. AMF’s gap for more funding remains large and we agree with GiveWell’s assessment that the total funding gap for LLINs for 2018-2020 appears to be hundreds of millions of dollars. We will publish commitments as they are made.
AMF top ranked!
AMF has again been top-ranked by the three leading organisations ‘dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities’.
GiveWell has ranked AMF their #1 charity, for the sixth time in seven years, and recommends to donors:
“We recommend that donors give 70% of their donation to the Against Malaria Foundation… “
Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save have confirmed AMF is again a top-ranked charity for the seventh year in a row.
AMF is granted tax-deductible status for donors in Norway
In other news, we are delighted to report that AMF has received tax-deductible status for donors in Norway effective 01 January 2017 by Skatteetaten, Norway’s tax authority. Any donations made to AMF on or after that date can be considered tax-deductible by the donor. See details about the Norway arrangement here and for a full list of the countries in which AMF has tax-deductible status, click here.
New additions to the AMF team
We are very happy to welcome two new members of the AMF team this year.
Julian is Operations Manager and Jenny is responsible for donation administration. They bring the total up to seven, including; Rob (CEO), Andrew (Head of Technology), Shaun (Programme Director), David (Uganda Representative) and Peter (Executive Chairman).
Support AMF here.
