Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Ebola - the Broken Pledges

Almost $2.9bn (£1.92bn) was pledged by the end of 2014 in donations to fight west Africa’s Ebola epidemic, yet only about 40% had actually reached affected countries, researchers have said.

“These delays … may have contributed to the spread of the virus and could have increased the financial needs,” said Karen Grepin, a global health policy expert at New York University who led the study and published it in the BMJ British medical journal. She found not only that more than half of funds pledged by international donors had not reached the target countries, but also that global agencies had failed to reliably estimate the amount of money needed. “The problem has not been the generosity of donors but that the resources have not been deployed rapidly enough.“


No comments: