Ebola Crisis Funding Is Short of $500 Million First Promised

(Bloomberg) -- Funding pledges for the Ebola crisis in central Africa stand at just over half the $500 million the region’s leaders originally announced earlier this week, as health officials warn that more money is needed to halt the spread of the disease. 

The commitments are at about $290 million, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya said on Thursday. Kaseya said that some organizations were declining to allow funds for development to be repurposed to fight the outbreak. He said he would give them one week to change their minds before naming them.

“We cannot afford to stop this outbreak without resources,” Kaseya said in a press conference. “We cannot afford to stop this outbreak just with political declarations from some countries.”

Eastern Congo is facing a “catastrophic collision” of war and disease as fighting accelerates the spread of Ebola, the World Health Organization warned on Wednesday. There are 1,077 suspected cases and 246 suspected deaths, the Africa CDC said on Thursday. 

Oxfam has put out an appeal for $10 million to scale up its work but it’s only seen around $800,000 donated so far, Congo Country Director Manenji Mangundu said in an interview. 

“The rate of flow of the funding is so slow,” he said. “It is affecting our ability to quickly scale up and reach more populations.”

The mistrust of aid workers is fuelling the spread of the disease and more staff are needed to engage with communities, Mangundu said. 

“We can’t have more staff if we don’t have the money,” he said.

In the previous outbreaks such as in 2018 and 2019, the influx of resources was massive and rapid, Mangundu said. Now, aid workers “need more resources to bring in supplies.”

Health officials have acknowledged that weak contact tracing, delays in lab testing results, shortages of protective equipment and slow progress in setting up quarantine facilities are all hampering efforts to stop the rare Bundibugyo strain from spreading. 

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(Updates with comment from Oxfam country director in fifth paragraph.)

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