The World Is Underfunding Congo's Ebola Outbreak and Calling It Prudence

Ebola has killed 5,103 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ten thousand four hundred and sixty-seven confirmed cases have been recorded across 67 health zones in eight provinces, as of 31 October. Mothers have buried children, health workers have died in the line of duty, and the virus has crossed into Kenya and Nigeria. And the people whose job is to stop it are short by $59.8 million.

Read that again. Not because the number is complicated, but because it is so small against what is at stake. Less than the price of a few fighter jets, a few thousand drone strikes, or a few years of a presidential security budget. Enough to pay the nurses, fund the screening posts, and keep the lights on at the border clinics. And it is missing.

Here is what the International Organization for Migration reported in early November. Of the $110 million requested for its multi-country Ebola preparedness and response plan, only $50.2 million has arrived. Nearly half of the gap sits inside Congo itself. The plan covers only June 2026 through March 2027, yet the outbreak does not respect calendar deadlines. Ebola does not stop on the thirty-first of March. Neither should our funding.

Let us be precise about what the shortfall means on the ground. IOM supports 67 displacement sites in the DRC, 50 of them in health zones where the outbreak is active. At those sites, surveillance has already caught three confirmed cases in just one week, between 26 October and 1 November. Imagine what goes undetected where no screening exists. In Tshopo Province, assessors identified 19 river crossings that may need surveillance points. Along the Ugandan border in Kasese, 13 of the 17 priority crossings are informal, meaning no official sign, no checkpoint, no thermometer. Kenya is supporting 22 points of entry. South Sudan is watching 12 border locations. This is not a border problem. It is a map of where a fever can walk in unseen.

Now ask the uncomfortable question. Why are so many crossings informal? Why are so many people displaced? Why does an outbreak in Ituri and North Kivu keep finding its way into neighbouring countries?

Because a large part of eastern Congo has been turned into a war zone, and nobody in Kinshasa or Kigali can pretend otherwise. Since early 2025, the M23 rebel group has held Goma and Bukavu, two of the largest cities in the east. United Nations Group of Experts reporting, including document S/2025/446, has documented Rwanda Defence Force troops operating inside Congolese territory in support of M23. Those are not rebels in the ordinary sense. They are the instrument of an invading army that has chosen to dismember a sovereign neighbour, and the bill for that aggression is now being paid in hospital beds, in clinic supplies, and in the bodies of ordinary Congolese. Ebola thrives where health systems have collapsed, where people flee in panic, and where the state cannot reach. Every displaced family and every shuttered clinic in the east is a gift to the virus.

We have seen this pattern before, and we will see it again unless Africa refuses to accept it. The Congolese state has its own failures: corruption in procurement, underpaid health workers, and security forces that too often extort rather than protect. Ituri and North Kivu also suffer from ADF and CODECO violence that predates the current M23 offensive. But no honest accounting can ignore that the deepest wound was opened by an outside army marching across a border that the African Union swore to defend.

Consider also who is paying attention. The IOM response is backed by the United States Government, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund, the European Union, Japan, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and the World Bank. These are serious partners, and their money matters. But when a funding appeal is 45 percent unmet, the lesson is that donor attention is a fickle thing. Outbreaks become headlines, headlines fade, and the people in the displacement camps are left holding the thermometer.

Africa has shown that a better way is possible. When Nigeria faced Ebola in 2014, its health authorities, led by the late Dr Ameyo Adadevoh in Lagos, traced contacts and isolated cases fast enough to contain the spread within months. Senegal caught its single imported case the same year and stopped it cold. More recently, Rwanda contained a Marburg outbreak in 2024 with community health workers, rapid contact tracing, and disciplined public communication. These are not miracles. They are the product of trained personnel, funded systems, transparent reporting, and leaders who treat public health as a sacred duty rather than a photo opportunity. Rwanda's health governance deserves credit. Rwanda's soldiers marching into Congo deserve condemnation. Both things are true, and a continent serious about its future must be able to say both.

So what must happen?

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the African Union must stop issuing statements and start issuing invoices to every government and donor that has pledged to global health security. The UN Security Council must demand an immediate humanitarian corridor for Ebola responders into M23-held territory, and it must name Rwanda's role in the war rather than hiding behind diplomatic euphemism. The DRC government must publish its procurement and health spending in full, so that every dollar of aid can be traced to a thermometer, a vaccine dose, or a nurse's salary. Regional border authorities must formalise the informal crossings the IOM has mapped, because a crossing that is recorded can be watched, and a crossing that is hidden is a death sentence.

As for the citizens of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, and Nigeria, you have more power than you think. Demand that your parliament ask, in public, how much your government has contributed to the Ebola response and how much remains unpaid. Demand that your health ministry publish its surveillance data and its border screening figures every month. Demand that your leaders stop treating Congo's suffering as someone else's problem, because the virus has already proven that it is yours too.

We are the ones who will bury these dead. We are the ones who will live with the consequences of every unfunded clinic and every unguarded river crossing. So we will not accept a world that calls $59.8 million a shortfall and shrugs. Fund the gap now. Hold the aggressors to account. Open the borders to health workers and close them to impunity. Ebola has already killed more than five thousand Congolese. The only question left is whether the rest of us will count the dead, or finally start saving the living.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB