For Humanosphere, Gabe Spitzer talked with medical anthropologist James Pfeiffer for a podcast “How the aid and development industry helped cause Africa’s Ebola outbreak,” which critiques the development aid fraternity for reinforcing policies that compromise the recipient countries’ capacity to respond to pertinent humanitarian crises. Mis-action and poor policy systems (particularly structural adjustment programs) espoused by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s led to the collapse of the education and health systems of many African countries. As argued in the podcast, this has continued to contribute to weak policies, reinforcing vulnerability to future humanitarian catastrophes.
Similarly, for African Arguments, Ashoka Mukpo, in “Ebola outbreak highlights Liberia’s crisis of development policy,” writes that the apparent complicity of the aid industry in the corrupt governance of the country has been hidden for so long but that the Ebola epidemic is showing the cracks had been there for so long.