A campaigner from Liberia says that international aid to combat Ebola is failing to reach its target.

A campaigner from Liberia says that international aid to 

combat Ebola is failing to reach its target.

By Tim Ecott

Agnes Umuna believes foreign aid agencies operate alone without cooperating with each other. The statistics are frightening. West African countries are struggling to combat the world’s worst ever outbreak of the Ebola virus. The latest figures show that since March more than five and a half thousand people have died, principally in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The majority of deaths (2,963) have been in Liberia. The World Bank estimates that the epidemic could cost countries in the region more than $36 billion by next year. Over $500 million in World Bank financing has been committed to tackling the disease and trying to prevent it spreading. The International Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, USAID and Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee are just some of the organisations trying to help. But according to Agnes Fallah Kamara Umunna, founder of Liberia’s Straight from the Heart charity, not enough aid is reaching the rural areas. “Much more community education is still needed. People still don’t know how to prevent the spread of the virus in their own homes. But some basic problems remain – like making sure people are trained how to bury their relatives if they die from Ebola.”

In spite of TV footage showing teams collecting corpses while wearing protective clothing Agnes Umunna says too much aid effort is concentrated in the cities. “People in the villages have no choice but to wash the dead bodies and bury them, but they don’t have gloves and masks. Supplies of these basics are not getting through.” The current outbreak has been traced back almost a year, yet Umunna claims that local governments are still holding meetings to decide on strategy. “I want to go out into the villages – I plan to conduct training in five communities in how to use protective clothing and how to dispose of infected corpses.” Incredibly, she says that local media need to do more. Reporters are not covering what happens at the village level. 

The State of Emergency has been lifted but local media don’t have cars, they can’t travel. Agnes Umunna also says that she believes the aid agencies are operating singly, and not collaborating efficiently with each other. “Not enough money or effort is being brought to bear among the grassroots. There is no central command and control centre dealing with the crisis. I have appealed for rubber gloves from the Centre for Diseas Control in the USA. But they won’t give them to me because I don’t have my own clinic. Even in Monrovia if you call for an ambulance to remove a dead body it doesn’t come for three or four days. And people don’t have bags to put the bodies into.”

Agnes Umunna is also concerned that NGOs are not ensuring that local health workers are protected and insured in the same way as foreign health staff. “Local disposal teams have been going on strike because they are paid so little. None of the foreign NGOs listen to the views of the workers on the ground. It’s tragic.”

This week, reports from Sierra Leone’s third largest city Kenema, that Ebola victims bodies have been dumped “unceremoniously” in public by workers protesting that they had not been paid an allowance of $100 per week for working with the deadly virus.

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