Against Malaria Foundation

Organisation

The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is a non-profit organisation based in London. It funds a single intervention: insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) for countries with a high malaria burden.

AMF does not distribute the nets itself. It works with each country's national malaria programme, which organises the campaign, and with implementing partners on the ground. AMF pays for the nets, while other funders, usually the Global Fund, pay for distribution.¹ AMF reports having funded around 509 million nets to date, protecting roughly 917 million people.² It is a very small organisation for its budget: at the end of 2023 it had 13 staff and was raising more than $100 million a year.¹

The problem: malaria

Malaria is preventable and curable, and it remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world. For 2024 the World Health Organization estimates 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths, about nine million more cases than the year before.³ The WHO African Region carries 94% of cases and 95% of deaths, and 75% of the deaths there are children under five.⁴

The long trend is still positive. Between 2000 and 2024 an estimated 2.3 billion cases and 14 million deaths were averted, around one million deaths in 2024 alone.³ The recent increase shows how insecure that progress is: among the causes the WHO names resistance to antimalarial drugs and to the insecticides in some of the nets.³

Approach

AMF buys the nets and agrees with the national malaria programme which net type goes to which region, based on malaria burden, insecticide resistance and price. It increasingly procures nets with additional active ingredients against resistance, such as piperonyl butoxide or chlorfenapyr.¹

Before a distribution, health workers or volunteers register households to establish how many nets each one needs. AMF requires this data to be collected digitally, and that typically 5% of households are revisited by a second team to check data quality. After the distribution, independent partners funded by AMF survey the presence, use and condition of the nets. The sources differ on how often: GiveWell describes surveys of 1.5% of registered households at 9, 18 and 27 months,¹ while AMF's own distribution register states surveys at 6, 18, 30 and 42 months, on a sample of 50 households each.⁵

Impact

GiveWell counts mass distribution of insecticide-treated nets among the best-evidenced interventions in global health. Two figures come up in this context, and they mean different things.

The first is a price somebody actually pays. Buying and delivering one net together is put at $4 to $6 depending on the country by GiveWell,¹ averaging around $6 per net.⁶ AMF reports the purchase price of a net alone at $2.00; the difference is transport, distribution and monitoring, which other funders pay for.⁷

The second is a model estimate rather than an account of money spent: around $5,500 per life saved. That is how much funding had to flow into the campaigns supported between 2022 and 2024, on GiveWell's estimate, for one death fewer to occur statistically.⁶ No such sum was ever spent on a single life, and nobody can say which child would have died without a net. The figure comes out of a model fed by the number of nets distributed, the usage measured in the follow-up surveys, the local malaria burden and the reduction in mortality estimated from trials. It exists to compare interventions with each other, not to account for costs. Because the malaria burden varies so much between places, the full review of December 2023 gives a range of $3,000 to $8,000 per death averted across the campaigns GiveWell funds.¹

The follow-up surveys also show protection falling away over time. Across the campaigns GiveWell has reviewed, an average of 83% of those surveyed slept under a hanging net 6 to 11 months after distribution, and 60% at 24 to 30 months. The evaluator therefore models about two years of effective protection per distribution cycle, even though campaigns run on a three-year schedule.¹

Transparency

AMF publishes every distribution individually, with registration and distribution data, photos, video and follow-up survey results, and links individual donations to specific distributions.⁵ GiveWell rates the organisation a top charity for malaria prevention.⁶ AMF reports that the recommendation has held continuously since 2009.⁸

The same evaluator also states reservations. Correspondence between the original data collection and the audit visit is lower than the objectivity of the measures would suggest: 65% to 95% at registration, and 44% to 85% in the follow-up surveys for the number of nets found hanging. The net durability AMF reports is more favourable than independent studies find, so GiveWell uses outside data rather than AMF's for that input. In its qualitative assessment GiveWell judges AMF less positively than its other top charities: it perceives AMF as hesitant to volunteer negative findings, notes that the organisation is very thinly staffed for its budget, and reports feedback from some national malaria programmes that AMF is demanding to work with, because it funds the nets but not the cost of distributing them.¹

Current projects

The figures come from AMF's public distribution register as it stood in August 2026. Each is the number of nets funded, not the number already distributed.⁵

Why the Wealth for the World Fund funds the Against Malaria Foundation

Few organisations can show so precisely what becomes of a donation. AMF funds one intervention whose effect is established in randomised trials, publishes every distribution together with its follow-up survey, and has submitted to scrutiny by an independent evaluator for more than fifteen years, one that names the weaknesses in that data publicly.

That combination is what convinces Wealth for the World: demonstrated effect, a traceable price per outcome, and an organisation that can live with its own evaluator criticising it. That AMF stays recommended despite the criticism says more about how well the evidence holds up than a flawless account could.