World Bank develops pandemic insurance fund
The World Bank Group is developing a pandemic emergency facility, which will rapidly disburse payouts to countries hit by such as crisis.
Speaking at the Foreign Correspondent Club of Japan, Jim Yong Kim, the president of World Bank, said: “Our goal is to work with partners to create a financial instrument that rapidly disburses a large amount of funds within eight hours, not eight months, of an outbreak that meets certain objective criteria.”
Given the success of past initiatives, the World Bank is examining whether similar approaches could work in crisis situations where financing is absent, such as pandemics.
One of these initiatives, the Pacific Catastrophe Insurance Facility, helped countries in the Pacific Islands secure $43 million of earthquake, tsunami, and tropical cyclone risk insurance coverage in 2014.
“The Ebola crisis shows why this is needed. Once we recognised the severity of the epidemic, the World Bank Group committed more than $500 million quickly to the governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, to help finance their immediate response,” said Kim. “But this money only started flowing about eight months after the outbreak began because we and the international community failed to recognise the urgency of the crisis.
According to Kim, the other main goal of a pandemic facility is to promote greater country investments in preparedness, which starts with having a strong, resilient health system.
“The Ebola crisis lays bare the consequences of inadequate public health capacity, from disease surveillance and laboratory analysis to frontline health services and community health workers: People die; economic growth rates decline; and countries, their neighbours, and the entire world, are put at risk. These consequences show why Japan’s recent $20 million contribution to support our Ebola recovery efforts is so important,” he said.
