Global Futures Initiative

Prior to Ebola, West Africa faced some of the most pressing health challenges – for every thousand people, Guinea only reached 0.1 doctors, Liberia 0.014 and Sierra Leone 0.022. In each country, health spending was minimal, with critical gaps in resources and personnel. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, health funding was rooted in post-conflict models that prioritized emergency aid rather than long-term sustainability. Even if the global community had reacted quicker, the weakness of the health systems would have nevertheless led to devastating results. The Ebola epidemic has demonstrated our shared vulnerability to disease, but the solution to future health disasters doesn’t lie only in creating a pandemic emergency facility or new pandemic bonds. Moving forward, we need to address the structural roots of these problems - the health inequalities that allowed Ebola to devastate West Africa in the first place.

As the number of cases begins to decline, there is a real fear that the urgency needed to address the root causes of Ebola will fade as the headlines become less pronounced. If this happens, we will fall into the same trap that led to our inability to invest in West Africa’s health systems from the beginning. We need to invest in health infrastructure, and rebuild the personnel that have been lost to EVD. We need to understand where the major gaps are, and build stronger communication channels. We need to understand how fear and mistrust were compounded by slow response times and poor treatment, and we need to start looking at how long-term socio-economic effects will have an impact on different sectors of the communities. Most important, we need to prioritize resiliency and long-term sustainability, looking beyond the immediate impacts of the crisis to see how and where we can make the greatest impacts on health equity.

Of course we need to strengthen our epidemic response, and Dr. Kim proposes some innovative ideas for what that would look like. Yet, in our rush to prepare for the next disaster, we must not let the original health inequalities fall by the wayside. Only by building resilient health systems that communities can believe in, can we ever provide a strong base from which a global pandemic response can be built upon.

Kailee Jordan is a graduate student pursuing her Master’s in global affairs at the University of Toronto. Jordan has interned at UN Women in Tanzania and has worked with organizations such as International Volunteer Network and Burnaby Youth Custody Services.