Anti-malaria bednets are cheap & effective at preventing a common & fatal disease. It is not OK to write in int'l newspapers claiming they fail. So Prof Paul Garner of the Liverpool School of - !! - Tropical Medicine & I wrote in The Economist in response to the recent letter:🧵
3/ On the persistent trope about bednets getting used for fishing:
a. According to Pascaline Dupas at Stanford, fishing communities are only 1% of Africa's communities at risk of malaria (!)(web.stanford.edu/~pdupas/Dupas_…). And
4/ b. Bednets don't last forever (they get holes etc.) So even if some are used for fishing, that doesn't prove that that they weren't used over beds. (None of which is a comment on the effect of bednets on fish-stocks. I'm only talking about bednets primary goal re malaria.)
5/ As mentioned, I asked Alex Nicholls, who wrote the original letter, what specific prog he was referring to, and what evaluation/s he was citing. (
6/ And in fact, the only bednet programme cited in the article to which Alex Nicholls referred is *hypothetical* - so it makes no sense for him to claim to know its results(!)
7/ Also as mentioned, I have no professional or commercial interest in bednets. I don't work in that at all! Just trying to keep people alive. By trying to direct philanthro resource to cost-effective work. The letter was dangerous as might dissuade donors from funding good work.
8/ Maybe a factor here is that Nicholls is a prof of social enterprise. I don't 100% know what that is, but sometimes it means 'social things that charge money' so as to be financially viable. They may not like bednets b/c the evidence is that charging for nets massively reduces
9/ usage and hence results - ie,. there's a trade-off between earned income and impact. (poverty-action.org/sites/default/…)
In fact, re #impact investing & all that, in every instance that I've examined, it turns out that charging for the product...
Various of you helped with this letter, so thanks again to you for your help with this bit of activism: just trying to keep people alive and healthy! 🤜🤛
@AvivaUK You see, Aviva, I am not afraid of fights in public. Aviva's treatment of us as customers has been appalling, and its recent letter to us derisory and insulting. You'll do well to give us a decent settlement - and soon.
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Giving Evidence today publishes #research about Royal patronages of charities: what are they, which charities have them, and whether they help.
It's in today's @TheTimes (£).
Our findings include these (thread):
Wow. I found a donor trying to give >£1m to delivery work in a certain sector. I also found*, and told them, that there's very little evidence about 'what works' in that sector. So they can't reliably fund delivery b/c nobody knows what to deliver. They'd better fund production…
2/ of research about what to deliver (& how). I connected them to some researchers. Now, 3 months later, they're starting a partnership to produce effective #research in that sector.
That entire intervention only took me about 2 hours. Rescued >£1m from almost certain fail.
3/ See: get your philanthro-advice from me: I know my game ;-)
*by using a @3ieNews evidence & gap map. (Which are a public good and hence hard to fund, but useful & consequential.)
Alors, je vous présente… our findings about (1) what academic #research already exists about UK charities & #philanthropy and (2) the topics on which UK charities & donors say that they would like more academic #research.
2/ Combined, the results are a ‘gap analysis’ which can inform future research. Both studies were funded by @Charity_Futures, re its work establishing an Institute of Charity at Oxford University. But the findings can inform the agenda of any researchers in this terrain.