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Less than 40% of pledged Ebola aid reached affected countries in 2014
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Of the $2.89 billion of international aid pledged by donors, only $1.09 billion was received by Ebola-affected countries by Dec. 31, 2014, according to recently published data.
Karen A Grépin, PhD, of New York University, examined fund requests, pledges and donations throughout the ongoing Ebola outbreak, as captured by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ financial tracking system. International monetary donations from countries, private sources and multilateral organizations were analyzed, while local donations, loans and volunteering personnel could not be captured by the U.N.’s tracking system.
The United States has been the largest donor ($900 million pledged), followed by the United Kingdom ($307 million), the World Bank ($230 million) and Germany ($161 million). Forty percent of pledges were made to the region as a whole; the majority of these funds have been received by Liberia ($882 million).
Just under 38% of pledged support had been paid and received by the end of 2014, which is approximately two-thirds of the amount requested to address the outbreak. The proportion of funded pledges per donor varies, Grépin wrote, as the U.S. had funded 95% of its pledges and the World Bank had funded about half of its own.
Bilateral donations accounted for 60% of funding, private sources made up 24.9%, and multilateral organizations contributed 11.5%.
“The problem has not been the generosity of donors but that the resources have not been deployed rapidly enough,” Grépin wrote. “The data do not allow the speed of response to be compared with that for other humanitarian crises, but they do suggest that we need a mechanism to enable more rapid disbursement of funds to fight public health threats such as Ebola, such as a dedicated fund that could be rapidly deployed for any emergency. Existing contracting mechanisms are too slow.” – by David Muoio
Disclosure: Grépin reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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