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  • WORLD VIEW

Pandemic bonds: designed to fail in Ebola

The World Bank’s funding scheme for disease outbreaks drained potential resources from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, says Olga Jonas.
  1. Olga Jonas

    1. Olga Jonas is a senior fellow and economic adviser at the Harvard Global Health Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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The final toll of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–16 was more than 11,000 lives, plus an estimated US$53 billion from economic disruption and collapse of health systems. In the outbreak’s wake, the global health community scrambled to deliver initiatives for increased health security. One flagship programme was the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). Under the scheme, investors who buy pandemic bonds receive generous ‘coupons’, which annually pay about 13% interest. This compensates investors for the risk that the bonds will make ‘insurance’ payouts to fight pandemics under certain conditions. Otherwise, cash returns to the investors when the bonds mature in July 2020.

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Nature 572, 285 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02415-9

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