East African states will access up to $15 million each in grants from
the World Bank to help them deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. PHOTO |
FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
East African states will access up to $15
million each in grants from the World Bank once the global lender starts
payouts from its controversial pandemic bonds, which are meant to
support poor nations in the event of infectious disease outbreaks.
The
World Bank declared that the Covid-19 pandemic, which has spread across
the globe infecting nearly 5.9 million people and causing more than
361,000 deaths, has triggered payments from the bonds.
A
total of $195.8 million from the bond, known as Pandemic Emergency
Financing Facility (PEF) is due to be paid out to 64 of the world’s
lowest income countries that are members of the World Bank’s
International Development Association (IDA).
The
payouts will be in addition to the $1.74 billion that the World Bank
has already disbursed to Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia and Rwanda in
the past three months in form of loans and grants, meant for Covid-19
response, budgetary support and for fighting the locust menace.
While the World Bank had not responded to The EastAfrican’s
queries on disbursements for EAC States by the time of going to press,
it says on its website that the PEF payments begin as soon as
governments from each of the receiving countries submit authorised
funding allocation requests.
“Specific
funding allocations were determined by population size and reported
cases, with a minimum of $1 million and maximum of $15 million going to
each country, and a heavier weight given to countries classified as
fragile or conflict-affected,” says the World Bank.
Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda’s ministries of
finance did not respond to our queries on whether they have applied for
the pandemic bond grant, while Uganda’s commissioner for macroeconomic
Policy in the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development,
Albert Musisi, said Kampala is yet to apply for the funding.
Dr
Musisi said Uganda has applied for a $300 million budget support loan
from the World Bank to cater for additional financing needs in the
healthcare sector and some vulnerable people deeply affected by the
consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in the country.
“This
loan facility will be presented to Cabinet and Parliament for approval
in coming weeks before the World Bank is asked to disburse the money,”
said Dr Musisi.
Kenya has already
received substantial support from the World Bank since the country
announced its first Covid-19 case on March 13. This includes a $50
million disbursement in early April for immediate support, Covid
surveillance and response, medical diagnostic services, quarantine,
isolation and treatment centres among others.
The
biggest financing has come in the form of a $1 billion budgetary
support loan that was approved on May 20, and $43 million approved on
May 21 to fight the desert locust invasion currently ravaging the
region.
Somalia has so far received
$137.5 million from the World Bank, to help fight locusts, Covid-19,
floods and drought, while Rwanda has received a total of $114.25 million
in Covid-19 response support.
Ethiopia
has received $145.6 million, half in form of loans and half in grants,
to fight the virus, mitigate against drought and locust menace.
The
World bank has also loaned South Sudan $40 million to provide a safety
net for vulnerable citizens, and $7.6 million to fight the virus.
While
substantial support has flown in to East African economies, including
from other sources such as the International Monetary Fund and the
Africa Development Bank (AfDB), there remains concerns over the capacity
of the various governments to account for the true scale of the
outbreak, as well as to handle a large-scale outbreak.
These
deficiencies were the reason for the setting up of the pandemic bond in
2016, largely due to the lessons learnt during the 2014 Ebola crisis in
West Africa that exposed the difficulty of mobilising funds quickly
enough from the global community to fight a pandemic.
It
was set up to deal primarily with outbreaks of six viruses— flu,
coronavirus, Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Rift Valley fever, Lassa
fever and filovirus (Ebola).
The
process of accessing the funds from the bond has however become a point
of controversy, which partly explains why the East African countries are
yet to get the money more than two months after reporting their first
cases of the global virus.
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