The Covid-19 pandemia is a global health crisis (with major financial and economic consequences) but international organizations, starting with the World Health Organization “are still insufficiently funded to respond quickly to the emergence of dangerous diseases – and to prevent them from spreading to global pandemics” argue Jens Martens and Bodo Ellmers, from Global Policy Forum in a briefing paper published last March 18. People in most Global South countries are likely to suffer its impact even more and therefore “in order to prevent the corona crisis from becoming a global development crisis, solidarity must not end at national borders.”
The Covid-19 pandemia is a global health crisis (with major financial and economic consequences) but international organizations, starting with the World Health Organization “are still insufficiently funded to respond quickly to the emergence of dangerous diseases – and to prevent them from spreading to global pandemics” argue Jens Martens and Bodo Ellmers, from Global Policy Forum in a briefing paper published last March 18. (The briefing is available, in German, at https://www.globalpolicy.org/images/pdfs/Briefing_Corona_Weltwirtschaft.pdf)
The problem is not new, it had already been shown in the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014/15. The World Bank then launched an innovative financing instrument that should make it possible to react quickly to future pandemics, but the instrument was so badly designed that so far it has benefited investors rather than the countries concerned.
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