West Africa Ebola epidemic (2014-2016)
The largest Ebola epidemic on record, which began in Guinea in late 2013, killed more than 11,000 people and whose slow funding led the World Bank to create the PEF facility and its pandemic bonds.
The West Africa Ebola epidemic is the outbreak of Ebola virus disease that struck Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone from December 2013 into 2016. Starting in a village in forested Guinea, it reached the capitals, which no Ebola outbreak had done before. The WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern on August 8, 2014 and lifted it on March 29, 2016. The toll exceeds 28,600 cases and 11,300 deaths, several hundred of them health workers. The World Bank put the GDP loss of the three countries at about $2.2 billion for 2015 alone. What struck the market was the timing of the money. International funds arrived months after the peak, once donor pledges turned into disbursements. Hence the idea of a prefunded facility with parametric triggers: the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), announced in 2016 and launched in June 2017, with $320 million of bonds plus swaps. Its Class B covered filoviruses, Ebola among them. It never triggered for Ebola: the 2018-2020 Kivu outbreak did not cross the international spread thresholds, and the DRC received $12 million from the cash window. The PEF finally paid $195.84 million in April 2020, for COVID-19. In private insurance, Ebola mainly hit travel, repatriation and business interruption policies of mines and project sites in the region.
Textbook case: a mining company operates an iron ore deposit in Guinea, insured for property damage and business interruption up to 80 million euros. In September 2014 it evacuates its expatriate staff and halts extraction for four months, losing 22 million euros. The policy requires physical damage at the site: nothing is paid. Only the employee repatriation cover responds, for 600,000 euros. The 2015 renewal adds an express communicable disease exclusion.
2014 Ebola outbreak, West African Ebola outbreak, Ebola virus disease epidemic, 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic
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