Ebola, infrastructure and internal reform dominate World Bank annual meetings

The World Bank’s annual meetings wrapped up in mid-October in Washington, D.C., with a call for new solutions to tackle the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and infrastructure development.

In a news conference following the meeting of the bank’s influential Development Committee on Saturday, President Jim Yong Kim suggested setting up a new pandemic emergency facility that could disburse money immediately to countries in the face of an outbreak like Ebola.

As Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone continued to struggle to contain the outbreak with ill-equipped public health systems, Kim insisted it’s not too late to stem the spread of the disease and apply the necessary interventions for the epidemic to not completely destroy the economies of the three most-affected countries.