The West African Health Organization, WAHO, and the African Risk Capacity, ARC, Agency has signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, establishing a collaborative framework to assist ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) Member States to better prepare, plan, and respond to the most impactful disease outbreaks of epidemic potential in the region.
Under the agreement, WAHO and ARC Agency will join forces and leverage on their individual expertise to estimate in each ECOWAS member states the likelihood of epidemic occurrence and severity for selected viral haemorrhagic fever diseases – such as Ebola, Marburg, Lassa fever – and meningitis; develop realistic costed outbreak response scenarios based on countries’ risk profiles; conduct disaster risk finance diagnostics at national and regional levels to evaluate the mechanisms and amount of funds available to respond quickly to an outbreak event; collaborate with Institut Pasteur de Dakar, Africa CDC, WHO and other institutions to develop state-of-art epidemic risk models to assess epidemic risks and improve decision making; incentivize countries to development disaster risk finance strategies; and support the design of the ARC/AU sovereign risk transfer solution for outbreak and epidemic risks to protect the government’s budget against fiscal shocks.
Speaking at the virtual signing of the MoU from ARC Agency Headquarters in Johannesburg, UN-ASG Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, Director-General of the ARC Group, indicated that “Our strategic partnership with WAHO, the leading institutions on health matters in the ECOWAS Region, is perfectly in line with our pursuit of smart partnerships with Global and African organizations and complementary to our efforts in building a framework to ensure resilience against disease outbreaks and health emergencies in our Member States, through technical, financial, and policy levels collaboration.”
The Outbreaks and Epidemics Programme of the ARC Group was built on its sovereign parametric risk insurance model which has delivered impressive and lifesaving results against drought and tropical cyclone for participating African countries. Targeted at 4 diseases of epidemic potential including acute haemorrhagic fevers (Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fever), and Meningitis, it aims to equip AU member states with an array epidemic preparedness and response tools (risk profiling, risk modeling, contingency planning) combined with adapted funding options, to swiftly contain and stop the spread of disease outbreaks.
From Bobo-Dioulasso, Stanley Okolo, the Director-General of WAHO, welcomed the partnership with the Specialized Agency of the African Union, the ARC Group, stating that “such collaboration will aim at strengthening the health security agenda in a region prone to disease outbreaks of different frequency and severity”.
 Member States to better prepare, plan, and respond to the most impactful disease outbreaks of epidemic potential in the region.){kind=link}