The World Bank has given the Democratic Republic of Congo $80m in grants to help its fight against the latest Ebola outbreak.
The funding included $20m from the Bank’s innovative pandemic emergency financing facility, which was set up in 2017 to channel private investment capital into the development aid sector.
The remainder came from World Bank group member the International Development Association, which funds low-income countries.
The World Bank paid the DRC an initial $11m of grants from the PEF last summer, when the deadly infectious disease first took hold.
There have been 807 confirmed cases of Ebola so far and 483 people have died, according to charity Medecins Sans Frontieres.
World Bank Group interim president and chief executive Kristalina Georgieva said the fresh disbursement of funds “ensures that lifesaving work can be urgently scaled up, and that lack of funding is not a constraint”.
Oly Ilunga Kalenga, DRC health minister, said the fresh funding “allows us and our partners to concentrate fully on fighting Ebola and protecting the health of our citizens”.
The PEF consists of a cash window — which financed Thursday’s payment — and a “pandemic bond” which pays out when a disease outbreak reaches sufficient scale to meet a set of detailed conditions.
Controversially, this includes the requirement that the disease must have crossed an international border — a specification which the DRC’s current Ebola outbreak does not yet meet. That has led some in the development aid sector to accuse the World Bank of benefiting private investors at the expense of public bodies.
The pandemic bonds were sold to investors in two classes: one which raised $225m covers diseases such as influenza and pays investors a coupon of 6.5 per cent over Libor, and the other, which raised $95m, covers Ebola among other diseases and pays 11.1 per cent over Libor.
The coupons are paid by donor nations Germany and Japan. If the bonds mature without paying out, investors get their money back, plus the chunky coupons.
Masatsugu Asakawa, Japan’s vice minister of finance for international affairs, said of the PEF that “we continue to believe that it offers a robust financing mechanism for pandemic response”.
