“In mid-July, … the near-final draft of the independent evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility — Malaria (AMFm) was released,” Victoria Fan, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), and Heather Lanthorn, a doctoral candidate at Harvard School of Public Health, write in this post in the center’s “Global Health Policy” blog. “Never intended to be an experiment or quasi-experiment, the pre-post evaluation of the AMFm has so far been interpreted cautiously and optimistically; we’re encouraged by this,” they write. “But given that the evaluation considers trends in the outcomes of interest before and after AMFm in only the chosen AMFm countries, the evaluation lacks a counterfactual or comparison group,” they continue and detail the findings of the report. They conclude, “Regardless of what is decided for the next phase of AMFm, we strongly recommend that resources be allocated for, at a minimum, tracking outcomes more frequently and also in the non-AMFm countries” (9/4).