{"id":7911,"date":"2015-06-08T09:55:53","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T09:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africaresearchinstitute.org\/wordpress\/?p=7911"},"modified":"2022-03-17T15:55:47","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T15:55:47","slug":"tackling-fragility-beyond-ebola-in-guinea-liberia-and-sierra-leone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/africaresearchinstitute.org\/wordpress\/tackling-fragility-beyond-ebola-in-guinea-liberia-and-sierra-leone\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling Fragility: Beyond Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Donald Kaberuka, ex-President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Ebola epidemic confirmed his belief that war and instability had left the Mano River countries (Guinea, C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Liberia) too weak to handle a serious crisis. Speaking at his last AfDB annual meeting as president, in Abidjan, Kaberuka said that the responses to the epidemic marked out these so-called \u201cfragile\u201d states from their neighbours.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMonths before the Ebola outbreak, we had been working with these countries through the Mano River Special Programme to rebuild their institutions. We must never abandon those programmes,\u201d Kaberuka told delegates at the May 27th launch of the AfDB and World Bank\u2019s joint programme<\/a> to support post-Ebola recovery in the affected countries. Assisting post-conflict and fragile states has become a personal mission for the AfDB\u2019s departing head, who served as Rwanda\u2019s minister of finance after its catastrophic war and genocide in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe solution to the Ebola crisis is not a vertical response \u2013 just to improve primary health care \u2013 the solution is to deal also with education, water supply and all the other basics that they lack. I am not a medical man, but I can say that otherwise we are treating these countries\u2019 symptoms, not their disease, which is the fragility of these countries,\u201d said Kaberuka.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must raise funds vertically but spend it horizontally,\u201d he added, turning to another of his favourite themes: the mismatch between the way donor funding has to be raised and the way it needs to be spent. There are funds for education, funds for prevention of malaria or HIV, but fragile states need help across the spectrum.<\/p>\n

Makhtar Diop, head of Africa at the World Bank, emphasised that the response also needs to be incremental. \u201cMy priority is to link the post-Ebola recovery programme to the programmes we already had in place for Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia before the epidemic,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve made it clear that new funds for these countries after the epidemic are a supplement, not a substitute for the existing programmes. There is a deficit in health spending in these states equivalent to 3% to 4% of their total budget.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diop outlined the priorities for preventing or combating further epidemics. The first is a regional protocol for intervention to avoid a repetition of the inaction and denial that followed the initial outbreak; secondly, a system of training health workers and auxiliaries; and finally a properly funded system to ensure that communities and villages are organised and prepared to prevent infectious and deadly diseases. \u201cWhen I grew up in Senegal, people took steps at the local level to prevent disease, this is no longer happening and it has to be done in future,\u201d said Diop.<\/p>\n

Diop issued a reminder to the assembled officials that \u201cAfrican governments were elected to govern, it is their responsibility to ensure that these things happen. It\u2019s not just a question of money, you also need the will and the human capacity to achieve them\u201d.<\/p>\n

The government in C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire seems to have understood this point from the outset. \u201cWe are bordering two countries that had the Ebola epidemic and also Mali, where there was a brief outbreak, but we got no help from the outside world initially,\u201d explained Dr Raymonde Goudou Coffie, the Ivoirian minister of health. \u201cWe were told that we didn\u2019t have Ebola so we\u2019d get no help.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe decided early what needed to be done,\u201d Dr Coffie continued. \u201cFirstly, we recognised the problem, we didn\u2019t deny Ebola\u2019s existence or its threat. Then we made sure the medical profession were able to diagnose and react to any outbreak, and thirdly we communicated with the other countries in the region.\u201d The rapid initial response was crucially important in preventing an epidemic in C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire. Later, Coffie acknowledged, the World Bank and AfDB did provide \u201csubstantial financial aid\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kaberuka had the final word, declaring that \u201ccommunication during the Ebola crisis was a disaster\u201d. In his view, the only way to co-ordinate the handling of similar future outbreaks on the continent is to have a \u201cWorld Health Organization for Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul Adams<\/a> is the author of “Bank to the Future”<\/a> and was in Abidjan for the AfDB General Meeting<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Adams reports from the launch of the AfDB and World Bank joint programme to support post-Ebola recovery, where the emphasis was on Africa\u2019s responsibility to its fragile states. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":13221,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1655,1690,1143,64,221,1142,646,578,1689,1048,1710,742,837,77,1561,1562,748,1047,1774,836,1777,1775,1200,216,1688,36,162,481],"class_list":["post-7911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-afdbam2015","tag-beyondebola","tag-afdb","tag-africa","tag-africa-research-institute","tag-african-development-bank","tag-african-politics","tag-ari","tag-beyond-ebola","tag-cote-divoire","tag-donald-kaberuka","tag-ebola","tag-guinea","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-hiv","tag-ivory-coast","tag-kaberuka","tag-liberia","tag-malaria","tag-mano-river","tag-paul-adams","tag-politics","tag-post-ebola","tag-sierra-leone","tag-west-africa","tag-world-bank"],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nTackling Fragility: Beyond Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - 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