Paper details

Paper authors	Kerrie Holloway
In panel on	Ebola and accountability
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

At the heart of the 10th Ebola outbreak in the DRC was tension over how the response should be treated: was the outbreak a public health crisis in a conflict context or was it a humanitarian crisis with Ebola as another of several public health events? The lack of an answer to this question highlights the friction at the top of the international leadership and coordination systems, co-led by WHO and the Ministry of Health and by OCHA, via the Emergency Ebola Response Office (EERO).

This paper explores the effectiveness of international leadership in the complex context of eastern DRC. In particular, it focuses on an early decision by the government WHO to treat the 10th outbreak as a discrete public health crisis (or a health security crisis) rather than a crisis-within-a-crisis, or one health priority among many, one threat to the community among many. This set the tone for poor synergy between health actors and humanitarian actors throughout the response and allowed the health leadership of the response to skirt around important accountability issues that a broader public health or humanitarian conception of the response would have put at its centre. Finally, it identifies recommendations to inform future responses.

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