Against Malaria Foundation: what happens between your donation and the bednet

Against Malaria Foundation has a simple mission: protecting people from malaria (a terrible disease). The charity funds insecticide-treated bednets, then makes sure they are distributed and used. What sets it apart is less the net itself than everything around it: a documented, published and verifiable process that lets donors find out what became of their money.

Romain Barbe

Founder · Mieux Donner · 6 min read

A charity built for effectiveness

In 2007, a handful of finance professionals in New York had a simple question: where could their donations actually make a difference? They wrote to charities and foundations asking for results, data and evaluations. What came back was mostly brochures: a mission statement, photos, stories, and very little to show whether the money was doing any good. When they couldn't find that information, they quit their jobs and founded GiveWell, an independent charity evaluator[1].

Against Malaria Foundation is one of the few organisations that answers questions with documents rather than a glossy leaflet. GiveWell first assessed it in 2010 and soon ranked it among its very top recommended charities[2]. GiveWell's standards have tightened since then and its research has grown many times over, but AMF is still one of the handful of charities it recommends.

That's no accident. When Rob Mather founded AMF, he started with one question: how could he help as many people as possible with the money available? He chose to follow the evidence and do the unglamorous work, rather than whatever makes a good story.

The model in a nutshell

• AMF doesn't distribute the nets itself: it buys them and funds the checks.
• Partners on the ground run the campaigns: health ministries, the Red Cross and specialist NGOs. They cover the distribution costs.
• Companies provide AMF's banking, auditing, legal and technology services free of charge, which keeps overheads down. A small group of donors pays the remaining running costs, so that 100% of your donation goes on nets.
• Every campaign is covered by a written agreement setting out each party's obligations, first among them sharing the data[3].

How a donation travels, step by step

Before: counting household by household

A national campaign involves several million nets. Before any distribution, teams visit every household in the area and record the number of sleeping spaces. One net covers around two people: a household of eight receives four, a household of three receives two. The data is entered on a smartphone, along with the household's GPS location.

If nobody knows how many nets are really needed, one extra net per household quickly adds up: across a whole country, that means hundreds of thousands of surplus nets, which end up being resold. Undercounting, on the other hand, leaves people unprotected.

During: distributing under supervision

On distribution day, health officials and village chiefs are present. An independent observer oversees the handover and checks that each household receives the planned number of nets. Beneficiary lists are signed, the distribution is photographed and filmed, and a report is sent to AMF[3].

After: going back to count

Handing out nets isn't enough. AMF organises household visits after the distribution, normally every six months, to check that the nets are there, hung up and in good condition[3]. The results are also useful to local authorities: when the data shows that use is falling in just a few health areas, limited resources can be targeted there rather than spread thinly everywhere.

Announcing a double count, then checking

Imagine a hundred people about to survey an area. AMF adds five more, who go back to a random 5% of the households each of them visited, without seeing the data already collected. The two sets of figures are then compared.

The key is that the first hundred know this before they set off. Their job is no longer to produce consistent numbers as quickly as possible, but accurate numbers that someone else will have to match. The system costs around 5% of the survey budget, a reasonable share of a campaign's cost to make sure the other 95% is well spent[4].

AMF sometimes goes further and pays a third-party organisation to resurvey entire villages chosen at random. This gives a second benchmark, so the quality of the work can be judged without relying solely on figures from the people who did it[4].

Your donation, tracked every step of the way

Every donation received is linked to a specific distribution, which you can follow from your personal page on AMF's website. It goes through four stages[3]:

• Allocation to an area where malaria is present and the need for nets is not yet covered.
• Pre-distribution: households are registered, house by house, to work out how many nets are needed for universal coverage.
• Distribution: nets are handed out with the district health services, coordinated by the national malaria control programme.
• Post-distribution: regular checks on how the nets are used and what condition they are in, through random, unannounced visits to around 5% of households, followed by tracking of the malaria indicators provided by the health authorities.

The documents for each campaign are published in one place, including the follow-up reports.

This material is what allows outsiders to check AMF without having to take its word for it. GiveWell spends thousands of hours a year evaluating charities and has re-examined AMF every year since 2010[2]. In other words, AMF doesn't get to pick the figures it's judged on.

AMF and GiveWell also show the limits

A monitoring system is not a guarantee. GiveWell, which recommends AMF, also publishes its reservations. Depending on the campaign, the initial surveys and the cross-checks match in 65% to 95% of cases. In some countries, follow-up surveys lose 35 to 40% of their sample over time, which can skew the results. And AMF has little information about the costs borne by its co-funders, which makes it harder to work out the true cost per net[5].

Since then, AMF has kept a running public record of how much new funding it can absorb. Agreements are already signed and nets are ready to be bought, with distributions scheduled as soon as the funds arrive. As of 10 September 2026, the charity could commit $70.3 million immediately, and put its needs over three years at $245 million[7]. In other words, an extra donation doesn't sit in a reserve: it helps protect more people.

AMF has declined to fund distributions in countries where the authorities refused to share household data[4]. The organisation won't launch a campaign if it has no way of checking that it will be carried out properly: no data, no nets.

Three questions to ask any charity

Not every cause can copy AMF's method as it is. But any cause can borrow its logic.

An organisation that answers all three isn't necessarily doing better than others. But it gives you a way to find out.

Frequently asked questions