Global Futures Initiative

Now imagine a similar virus spreading through the populated geographies of Bangladesh or India. Bangladesh, with its high rate of rural-urban migration, could potentially transfer the deadly virus to the cities in no time. What’s worse is that once it enters any of the multitude of densely inhabited slums of the capital city, the existing health systems in the country will be nowhere near equipped to respond to or stop its transmission within and beyond the country borders, and prevent an all-out health emergency.

Dismal as the situation might be, at his inaugural lecture for the Global Futures Initiative last week, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim highlighted some important steps the development community should take to prepare for future emergencies such as this. The first is changing our mental model of low aspirations when it comes to providing healthcare for the poor. Behavior change is needed at the top, where we can often be constrained by our own mental models from pursuing innovative and cost-effective solutions to address complicated health issues faced by the poor.

The second involves the creation of a pandemic facility through public-private partnerships- between WHO, the donor community and insurance companies- that could finance better surveillance, rapid response and resource deployment, development and distribution of vaccines, etc., to address pandemic threats in the future. However, though the inclusion of the private sector holds promise, as Dr. Kim himself pointed, there exists a communication gap between private sector insurance companies and the development community that needs to be bridged first. Their mutual desire to prevent pandemics- which are costly both in terms of lives and money- could very well be the starting point of a necessary and mutually beneficial partnership.

As Dr. Kim pointed out, the next ‘Ebola’ can happen any time. Rather than waiting for another epidemic from another part of the world to catch us off-guard, we need to not only start fixing the poor health infrastructures in developing countries, but also the capacity of the global development community to act and respond on time. And this needs to happen while the memory of the Ebola tragedy is still fresh- before our complacency prevents us ensuring that the lessons from this crisis do not go to waste.

Tasmia Rahman is a first year Master of International Development Policy student at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy, where she also works as a research assistant for Gui2de. Previously, Rahman worked with BRAC in Bangladesh for two years.