Comments
Hi,
By the way, sorry for the lack of response to your thoughtful reply in your previous post. I think the perspective in your comment is valid but I can't easily write a complete response that would be fully useful. (I think your perspectives in your post and comments are right, and AMF/GiveWell and EA is right at the same time, and explaining this seems hard.)
[ AMF's Congo distribution's ] $7,400 cost-per-life-saved is outside the range typically quoted by GiveWell for the Against Malaria Foundation.
[ It doesn't seem good that ] the best distributions donors can fund are in areas where (a) people already have some bednets, and (b) the new bednets will last less time than if they were distributed elsewhere.
The cost effectiveness calculations for other regions with recent distributions all have a lower cost-per-life-saved. Guinea is $4,300, Uganda is $5,700 and Togo is $6,600.
Edit: The content below is wrong, I was confused and thought the OP was literally discussing a ~$216k program. AMF aims to spend tens of millions of dollars annually for distribution to the Congo (DRC).
Personally, as an outsider doing desk analysis, I think I risk ending up only superficially understanding the work involved delivering effective aid to sub-Saharan Africa.
I would be modest when making simple comparisons, for example, I would make considerations for logistics and execution:
It’s not like we are regularly given container ships full of nets and each month we decide which country we sail into and unload net deliveries. For each net distribution program, it takes years to plan, build partnerships and setup logistics. Maybe calculations can change by 50% in some cases.Another consideration is that, based on your numbers, it’s about $216,000 spent on the Congo program. That seems much smaller than the others. Maybe they scaled it back for the very reasons you mentioned, because it's less cost effective. Note that even if you want to pull back, you may want to keep a small operation to keep up relationships, infrastructure, permits, politics, and other knowledge.Another reason is that maybe AMF spent years and hundreds of thousands investigating the Congo, which is exactly what you should do when deploying tens of millions of dollars. To do this research, maybe it was necessary for GiveWell or AMF to promise some program at the end of it, and this $216K program was the smallest viable such program.
I spent time looking for this table below including directly Googling some of the numbers, which typically turn up results, but this didn't work and I couldn't find this information:
I think it is very important that you provide sources for all figures discussion (which is as easy as copying and pasting the hyperlink) because the amount of "surface area" to draw content from is large and the context, age, purpose of sources matters.
The numbers seem to come from the latest GiveWell's Cost-Effectiveness model published here:
https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness/cost-effectiveness-models
Direct link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11HsJLpq0Suf3SK_PmzzWpK1tr_BTd364j0l3xVvSCQw/edit#gid=1364064522
Lorenzo, thanks for diving in here to help out. I can confirm this is indeed the source I used.
Charles, I didn't expect anybody to bother checking my source values. I described them as "GiveWell's 2021 cost effectiveness calculation" which I think satisfies your criteria on context, age & purpose of source. Googling that gives me Lorenzo's first link above.
Inspired by your comment I've now figured out how to add in line links for sources so that will perhaps help address this type of comment in future.