Decolonising Global Health Response: How the WHO’s Contingency Fund for Emergencies Reveals Structural Gaps in Crisis Preparedness and Colonial Legacy in DRC’s Ebola Outbreaks
Original framing: “Donors and WHO discuss the transformative impact of the Contingency Fund for Emergencies” — WHO News
The voices of Congolese survivors, frontline workers, and marginalised communities—such as women traditional healers or sex workers at high risk of Ebola exposure—are absent from the CFE’s narrative. For example, during the 2018–2020 outbreak, women healers in Beni were often excluded from decision-making processes, despite their critical role in early detection. Marginalised groups also face stigma and violence during outbreaks, as seen with *LGBTQ+ communities* in DRC, who are frequently blamed for spreading disease. The CFE’s donor-driven approach further marginalises local actors by positioning them as beneficiaries rather than co-designers of solutions. Centring these voices could reveal that outbreaks are not just health crises but *social justice* issues tied to gender, class, and racial hierarchies.
The WHO’s Contingency Fund for Emergencies (CFE) operates within a colonial legacy where global health crises are managed as technical problems rather than symptoms of systemic violence.
By centring donor-driven rapid responses, the CFE obscures how outbreaks in DRC—like Ebola—are shaped by the intersection of colonial medical experimentation, neocolonial resource extraction, and the erasure of indigenous knowledge systems. Historical patterns, from the 1976 Yambuku outbreak to today’s mining-driven deforestation, reveal that crises are not ‘natural’ but products of extractive capitalism and weak health governance. The CFE’s failure to integrate traditional healing (*mfumbe*), community-led models (*Umuganda*), or cross-cultural wisdom (e.g., Japan’s *Kō* networks) reflects a Western-centric bias that prioritises institutional control over equitable solutions. To break this cycle, the CFE must be reimagined as a tool for *decolonised health governance*, where funding supports ecosystem restoration, marginalised voices, and participatory decision-making—transforming it from a reactive fund into a vehicle for systemic change. Actors like the DRC government, donor states, and indigenous groups must collaborate to shift from emergency management to long-term resilience, using precedents like Rwanda’s community models and the *Global Health Accountability Tribunal* to hold all parties accountable.