I don’t know enough about AMF to answer your question directly, but I can shed some light on market failures by way of analogy to my employer, Kaya Guides, which provides free psychotherapy in India:
Our beneficiaries usually can’t afford psychotherapy outright
They sometimes live rurally, and can’t travel to places that do psychotherapy in person
There are not enough psychotherapists in India for everyone to receive it
The government, equally, don’t have the capacity or interest to develop the mental health sector enough (against competing health priorities) to make free treatment available
Our beneficiaries usually don’t know what psychotherapy is, or that they have a problem at all, nor that it can be treated
We are incentivised to make psychotherapy as cheap as possible to reach the worst-served portion of the market, while for-profits are incentivised to compete in more lucrative parts of the market
I can see how many, if not all, of these would be analogous to AMF. The market doesn’t and can’t solve every problem!
That sounds pretty reasonable for why psychotherapy wouldn’t be as widespread as it should. It looks to me like most of these reasons wouldn’t apply to AMF. Training new psychotherapists takes years and tens of thousands of dollars (at developing-world wages). Getting more malaria nets requires buying more $5 malaria nets, and distributing malaria nets is much easier than distributing psychotherapists. So reasons 1–3 and #6 don’t carry over (or at least not to nearly the same extent). #4 doesn’t seem relevant to my original question so I think #5 is the only one that carries over—recipients might not know that they should be concerned about malaria.
I don’t know enough about AMF to answer your question directly, but I can shed some light on market failures by way of analogy to my employer, Kaya Guides, which provides free psychotherapy in India:
Our beneficiaries usually can’t afford psychotherapy outright
They sometimes live rurally, and can’t travel to places that do psychotherapy in person
There are not enough psychotherapists in India for everyone to receive it
The government, equally, don’t have the capacity or interest to develop the mental health sector enough (against competing health priorities) to make free treatment available
Our beneficiaries usually don’t know what psychotherapy is, or that they have a problem at all, nor that it can be treated
We are incentivised to make psychotherapy as cheap as possible to reach the worst-served portion of the market, while for-profits are incentivised to compete in more lucrative parts of the market
I can see how many, if not all, of these would be analogous to AMF. The market doesn’t and can’t solve every problem!
That sounds pretty reasonable for why psychotherapy wouldn’t be as widespread as it should. It looks to me like most of these reasons wouldn’t apply to AMF. Training new psychotherapists takes years and tens of thousands of dollars (at developing-world wages). Getting more malaria nets requires buying more $5 malaria nets, and distributing malaria nets is much easier than distributing psychotherapists. So reasons 1–3 and #6 don’t carry over (or at least not to nearly the same extent). #4 doesn’t seem relevant to my original question so I think #5 is the only one that carries over—recipients might not know that they should be concerned about malaria.