What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting AMF today?
Habiba Banu
Karma: 1,293
Spiro: an update 2.5 years on and a fundraising ask for expansion
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 particular context where it hasn’t been tried before.
Our program may well have elements that are not yet widespread e.g. particular drug regimens, dignostic tools or methods of program delivery (such as through schools or using mobile vans)
Have I understood correctly that the Global Fund wouldn’t be willing to fund the proof-of-concept and pilot programmes itself?
Yes you have understood correctly that we don’t expect to get Global Fund money going towards these early stages.
The Global Fund works on a 3 year cycles and provides money for a country’s national TB program over that period.
We’re hoping to introduce a new program that we don’t expect a government / national TB program to already have funding for from the Global Fund. Though, in time, we hope that it will become part of the national TB program activities.
Hope that answers your questions!
Spiro—New TB charity raising seed funds
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+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers!
I’ve learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with—so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun—I’ll for sure be sad to leave them.
There are a few main reasons why I’m leaving now:
New career challenge—I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I’ve done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn’t exist without me—I’d like to give it a try sooner rather than later.
Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit—Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven’t gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn’t been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I’m more circumspect about some of the things I think we’re not doing as well as we could (e.g. Toby’s thoughts here and Holden’s caution about maximising here and things I’ve posted about myself). Overall, I’m personally keen to take a step away from EA meta at least for a bit and try and do something that helps people where the route to impact is more direct and doesn’t go via the EA community.
Less convinced of working on AI risk—Over the last year I’ve also become relatively less convinced about x-risk from AI—especially the case that agentic deceptive strategically-aware power-seeking AI is likely. I’m fairly convinced by the counterarguments e.g. this and this and I’m worried at the meta level about the quality of reasoning and discourse e.g. this. Though I’m still worried about a whole host of non-x-risk dangers from advanced AI. That makes me much more excited to work on something bio or global health related.
So overall it seems like it was good to move on to something new and it took me a little while to find something I was as excited about as CE’s incubator programme!
I’ll be at EAG London this weekend! And will hopefully you’ll hear more from me later this year about the new thing I’m working on—so keep an eye out as no doubt I’ll be fundraising and/or hiring at some point! :)
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 :)