Ebola spending: will lack of a positive legacy turn dollars to dolour?

Millions were invested in west Africa to tackle the Ebola crisis, but some experts doubt there will be any lasting benefits for public health systems

THE GUARDIAN by  Clár Ní Chonghaile                                                          Feb. 13, 2015

LONDON -- While it is still too early to call time on the Ebola outbreak, a sense that the worst may have passed is tentatively taking root in west Africa, alongside an acute realisation of the need to ensure a positive long-term legacy for battered healthcare systems.

The international community might have taken too long to react initially but the arrival of hundreds of soldiers and volunteer health workers, backed up by millions of dollars from donors, stopped the crisis from becoming even worse. A dire forecast of a possible 10,000 cases a week, for example, was never realised.

Now the challenge is to stamp out the disease – the incidence of new cases had fallen at the beginning of the year, but that decline has stalled in the past few weeks – while simultaneously rebuilding health systems so decrepit that they contributed to the rapid spread of Ebola across Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia last year....

Tom Dannatt, the founder of UK charity Street Child, said donors risked lagging behind events in the recovery as they had done during the emergency response. “The flat-footedness of the entire [aid] structure has been dramatically exposed by almost every stage of this crisis,” Dannatt said. “As to the investment made in the past six months, it doesn’t have any longevity beyond Ebola.
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http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/feb/13/ebola-spending-positive-healthcare-legacy-west-africa