Executive Summary:
On 23 March 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the Guinean Min-istry of Health had notified WHO of a rapidly evolving outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD, or “Ebola”) in forested areas in south eastern Guinea. Despite the efforts made by the governments, the spread of the disease has affected Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ni-geria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Senegal, claiming over 3,000 lives, and potentially affecting over one million people, as regular trade and services are dis-rupted. The scale of outbreak is unprecedented, and has the serious social, economic and security implications for the affected countries, and the region.
On 19 September the UN Secretary-General established the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) with a main coordinating hub and office in Accra and operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The Mission will provide the opera-tional framework and unity of purpose to ensure the rapid, effective and coherent action necessary to stop the outbreak, to treat the infected, to ensure essential services, to preserve stability, and to prevent the spread to countries currently unaffected. The UN Security Council has declared the Ebola crisis a threat to peace and security, and WFP has received, through the Executive Director, a request to provide support to the UNMEER mission.
This Special Operation is established to augment the capacity of the humanitarian response under the United Nations System umbrella, and to support UNMEER efforts to stop the spread of Ebola. Through this Special Operation, WFP aims to 1) provide logistics, infra-structural support to UNMEER to enhance the efficiency of the humanitarian response; 2) provide access to humanitarian personnel to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assis-tance and 3) support strategic management of WFP’s preparedness and response for Ebola and other related hazards globally. This Special Operation will also consolidate and super-sede the existing Special Operations already in place for the Ebola response.
WFP aims to implement the following activities: A. Establishment of logistics staging areas in Accra, national hubs in the three capitals and forward logistics bases in the affected countries
B. Provision of Humanitarian Air Services and Strategic Airlifts
C. Interagency Logistics Coordination
D. Logistics and Telecommunications Infrastructure
E. Supply chain capacity augmentation
F. Strategic preparedness measuresThe Special Operation will be implemented for an initial duration of four and a half months at a total cost of US $87,000,000. The scope of the project and the budget will be revised as necessary, as the situation evolves and further requirements become apparent.