ABSTRACT
This chapter is written by Susana Edjang, originally from Equatorial Guinea. She is Champion for Health of Africa 2.0, a pan-African civil society organisation, is a Council member of the UK’s Royal African Soceity, and works in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General on development issues, where she was previously Project Manager of his flagship initiative to advance the health-related MDGs Every Woman Every Child. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. The chapter contains the following sections:
• Overview • Some context on health in Africa • Aid and aid for health in Africa • HIV/AIDS: an aid dependency crisis multiplier • Ebola: aid and the near collapse of the health systems in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra
Leone • Rwanda: aid and partnerships – understanding when urgency can be the enemy of the
future • Conclusion: aid as long term investment
The starkest fact about Africa’s aid dependency is that it does not exist; instead many African countries suffer from a huge misallocation of aid, particularly for health. This misallocation endangers the gains made over the past 20 years, and more crucially endangers the long-term goal of all aid and health workers, to build resilient health systems for African countries, their peoples, the continent, and the world. This is a danger thrown into sharp relief by the recent outbreak of the Ebola virus in three West African countries, which presented a perfect storm of examples of what Africa needs to avoid, what is possible when Africa’s resources are wellmobilised and what is at stake when we get it wrong.
