TOPIC AREA 2
ENSURING COMMUNITY-LEVEL AWARENESS & ACTION Building Local Capacities
Often times, conversations about pandemic preparedness and response take place without the inclusion of the countries that are most likely to be affected by these outbreaks. Through the International Health Regulations (IHR), many WHO member states have taken steps to build local capabilities and resilience, but this has not gone far enough. “The lack of capacity in Guinea to detect the virus for several months was a key failure, allowing Ebola eventually to spread to bordering Liberia and Sierra Leone. This phase underscored the problem of inadequate investment in health infrastructure, despite national governments’ formal commitments to do so under the International Health Regulations (2005) and awareness among donors that many lower income countries would need substantial external support” (Moon et al., 2015, p. 2206). The challenges of building local capacities and resilience were starkly demonstrated during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. As Sands et al. (2016) explains, “Identifying the outbreak in
Global Leadership at a Crossroads
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