International Monetary Fund policies criticised over weak response to Ebola in West Africa

Researchers have recently criticised International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies over weak response to Ebola in West Africa

Researchers from Cambridge University's Department of Sociology along with colleagues from Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, examined the links between the IMF and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

They found that IMF programmes over the years have imposed heavy constraints on the development of effective health systems of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the cradle of the Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 6,800 since March in 2014.

The researchers said that economic policy reforms advocated by the IMF have undermined the capacity of health systems in these three nations, systems already fragile from legacies of conflict and state failure, to cope with infectious disease outbreaks and other such emergencies.

By reviewing the policies enforced by the IMF before the outbreak, extracting information from the IMF lending programmes between 1990 and 2014, the researchers were able to examine the effects on the three countries, and identified three factors that led to the further weakening of health care.

One was that the IMF required economic reforms that reduced government spending, which researchers claimed absorbed funds that could be directed to meeting pressing health challenges, while another related to IMF caps on the public sector wage bill which impacts on the capacity to hire and adequately pay key health care workers.

The third factor was that the IMF campaigns for decentralized health care systems, which in practice makes it difficult to mobilize coordinated responses to outbreaks of deadly diseases such as Ebola.

However, in recent months, the IMF has announced 430 million dollars of funding to help combat Ebola in West Africa. The research is published in journal Lancet Global Health.