Political | ebola

Political Effects

Political factors and governanace, can have a very strong influence on the development of a country. This is due to the government being able to control how money is spent, and having the power to divert money away from investement to benefit the people. Concequently, the giving of vast amounts of aid to help during the Ebola virus outbreak may not directly benefit those who need it at ground level. Therefore, this is why organisations, e.g. World Health Organisation and MSF, are essential in helping to deal with a crisis.

Guinea

Political instability is not helpful when trying to re-establish the economy and health of a countries work force:

Guinea has a high mineral wealth, as a leading bauxite exporter, thus giving it the potential to be a wealth nation. However, it is one of the poorest nations in Africa. with most people live on less than $1 a day.

Independence was granted in 1958, and Guinea turned to the Soviet Union, which led to tens of thousands of deaths during 26 year regime of Ahmed Sekou Toure.

Civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire have increased the population from 1996 = 107,300 to 300,000. This makes management and law inforcement a challenge.

Therefore, trying to manage the ebola virus posed a problem due to the lack of medical facilities and funding to stretch across the whole populaiton.

Sierra Leone

The Ebola virus combined with recovery from 10 year Civil war, which ended in 2002 has reuslted in various problems:

Healthcare systems, loss of education and distressed social structures are already major problems. There are not the resources to cope.

However, democracy is improving and in 2012 elections were the first held without UN supervision.

The outbreak of the Ebola virus hilighted the lack of investemnt over recent years, as the trade of "blood diamonds" helped to fund wepons during the civil war.

Highly dependent on aid already through the Millennium Development goals to tackle malaria and tuberculosis, t has meant that little external aid was left to upport development of health systems as a whole.

It is this lack of balanced investment which has contributed to the challenges of controlling the current Ebola outbreak.

Liberia

Liberia is only recently recovering from civil war, thus meaning that the governance of the country is not particularly strong:

This has resulted in poor trust of the people, thus meaning that when offered aid and help during the ebola outcreak, most citizens believed that 'aid' being offered was a ploy and not genuine. this lead to many rumours being spreas and people unlikely to accept help and education to prevent the spread of the disease. This worsened the situation.

The civil war lead to 250,000 people being killed and thousands fleeing. The lack of investement meant that the capital still reamins ithout mains electircity and running water.

There are high levels of corruption. Unemployment and literacy rates are also high. The UN maintains 15,000 soldeirs in Liberia, which is one of the most expensive peace keeping operations.

The political issue of foreign aid to these countries is important for their future. Governments accepting foreign aid is a good start, however the money may not always reach the people that need it the most. Therefore trying to work from the ground up through charities and creating long term sustainable invetment opportunities will be essential for western africa recovery.