Tedros apologizes as report details WHO sex abuse in DRC Ebola crisis

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he takes “ultimate responsibility” for the behavior of aid workers employed by WHO who were accused of sexual exploitation and abuse while responding to the 10th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which took place from 2018 to 2020.

His statement Tuesday followed the release of a damning report detailing the extent of the abuse allegedly committed by responders, including at least 21 WHO doctors, consultants, and senior staffers — both national and international — during the response.

“It's my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused but are held to account,” Tedros said in a press briefing after the independent commission tasked with reviewing the allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation in DRC revealed its findings.

The WHO chief also apologized to the women who alleged the abuse.

“I'm sorry for what was done to you by people who are employed by WHO to serve and protect you,” he said. “What happened to you should never happen to anyone.”

“As the director-general, I take ultimate responsibility for the behavior of the people we employ and for any failings in our systems that allowed this behavior,” he said. “And I will take personal responsibility for making whatever change we need to make to prevent this happening in future.”

Tedros didn’t disclose what that would mean in practice. He also did not directly respond to a question asked during the press briefing on whether he plans to resign from his position or not pursue a second term in office. He only said that the next step for the agency is “to ask questions.”

However, he identified three key areas of priority for WHO: providing support, protection, and justice to the women alleging the abuse; taking action to address management and staff failures; and conducting a “wholesale reform of our structures and culture.”

Report findings

WHO established the independent commission following an investigation by The New Humanitarian and the Thomson Reuters Foundation in September 2020 in which more than 50 women accused Ebola aid workers, including some who worked for WHO, of sexual exploitation and abuse. Many of the women were under short-term contracts as cleaners, cooks, or community outreach workers.

Co-chaired by Aïchatou Mindaoudou, who was formerly Niger’s foreign affairs minister, and Congolese human rights activist Julienne Lusenge, the commission’s mandate was to “establish the facts and underlying circumstances relating to allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by the organisation's staff and/or its partners or contractors” during the response to the 10th Ebola outbreak in DRC, which was declared in August 2018 and ended in June 2020.

Part of its mandate was also to identify systemic issues that impeded the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse during the response.

The commission went on field missions in eastern DRC and conducted a total of 210 interviews. The team received 75 testimonies — 63 from women and 12 from men, who ranged in age from 13 to 43.

A majority of the women who made the accusations were in poor economic and social states, with very few completing secondary education. Many of them said they were forced to have sex to get a job in the response, keep their jobs, or get better pay. Some became pregnant and gave birth.

Of the 83 people identified by the commission with accusations against them, 21 were employed by WHO during the Ebola response, the commission found.

Despite the number of women alleging sexual exploitation and abuse identified by the commission, it found a “total absence of reports of sexual exploitation and abuse at the institutional level during the reporting period.” The report also found that WHO focused mainly on addressing the Ebola outbreak and was “completely unprepared to deal with the risks/incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse.”

Meanwhile, many of the women have complained of not receiving any assistance and said they have been “left to deal with the physical and moral consequences of the sexual exploitation and abuse they have suffered,” according to the report.

WHO’s failures

In its 35-page report, the independent commission found a number of structural problems that prevented WHO from managing risks of sexual exploitation and abuse in its operations.

These included the lack of a specialist to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse among WHO emergency teams in the field, despite “suspected acts of sexual exploitation and abuse” during the response to the ninth Ebola outbreak in DRC in 2018 and numerous incidents of such acts “in several UN system operations in the past.”

During the response to the 10th Ebola outbreak in the country, the recruitment of staffers also showed a lack of transparency, the report said. Local workers were recruited “without competitive bidding, thus opening the door to possible abuses.”

Trainings on prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse were also limited and delayed, according to the report. The first WHO-organized trainings in these areas only took place five months after the 10th Ebola outbreak was declared an international public health emergency in July 2019. In addition, of the 2,800 staffers deployed under WHO in the response, just 371 participated in the training, according to the report.

It added that WHO “has not done much to raise awareness of sexual exploitation and abuse” in the local population.

Further, the commission found that actions by senior officials who were responsible for overseeing such cases were not in line with WHO’s official policy on preventing and combating sexual exploitation and abuse. Some also failed to report incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse to more senior officials or to proactively pursue a reported incident.

In its recommendations to WHO, the commission said the organization needs to clearly define lines of authority in decision-making for preventing and responding to reports of sexual exploitation and abuse, as well as include a specialist on these issues in future field emergency management teams.

It also recommended that WHO impose disciplinary sanctions on those who fail to report potential sexual exploitation and abuse incidents.

It said the agency should “Systematically initiate preliminary investigations at the first suspicion that sexual exploitation and abuse may have occurred in the course of an operation or activity undertaken by the organisation, without reaching a specific individual complaint” and “Immediately” start an internal investigation to “identify individual responsibilities for the failure to activate the investigation procedures” in the organization’s official policy.

Next steps

Tedros said Tuesday that WHO will ban the people identified as perpetrators from future employment with WHO and notify the broader U.N. system so they cannot be employed at its other agencies.

At the same press briefing, the U.N. agency’s legal counsel, Derek Walton, also said the organization had terminated the contracts of four people employed by WHO during the Ebola response who faced accusations. These four, whose identities and positions were not revealed, were the only ones among the accused who continued working for the agency until the report was transmitted to WHO.

Some of the women were only able to provide the first names of others who may have perpetrated abuse, and therefore those people have yet to be fully identified. Tedros said WHO is engaging an external investigative service to assess additional steps.

The commission recorded nine allegations of rape during its investigation.

WHO will also refer allegations of rape to national authorities in DRC for investigation, as well as in the countries of the accused people “where applicable,” the WHO chief said. WHO has requested the commission’s confirmation that the women making rape allegations have provided consent for this purpose, he added.

Tedros said that WHO will ensure the women will have access to services, including medical and psychosocial support and educational assistance for their children, once WHO has been provided with more information on their identities and locations.

“These services are available in DRC from our partners across the U.N. system,” he said.

Tedros said the failure of WHO employees to “respond adequately” to reports of sexual exploitation and abuse “is as bad as the events themselves.”

“We must have zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse and zero tolerance for inaction against it,” he said.

He said WHO has placed two senior staffers on administrative leave while the probe by the external investigative service takes place. WHO will also take steps to “ensure that others who may be implicated are temporarily relieved of any decision-making role in respect of allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse.”

He also clarified that these actions “do not in any way prejudge the outcome of the investigation, and are not a disciplinary measure or attribution of guilt.”

WHO has asked its Independent Expert Oversight Advisory Committee to engage an external group to audit cases processed by the agency’s internal oversight body to establish “whether any further cases of incidents of possible sexual exploitation and abuse were subject to procedural failings.”

Tedros said WHO will also “identify and address any shortcomings in our culture or leadership that fail to adequately protect the people we serve or that create opportunities for abusers to exploit.”