Abstract
This chapter focuses on the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak in the Mano River region of West Africa, and particularly on Liberia. Global public health has moved away from providing primary health care and prevention to increasing concern about securitisation and thus investment in the stopping of infectious diseases. The era of Ebola has only amplified international investments and interest in efficient surveillance of emergent infectious diseases. Informed by Weir and Mykhalovskiy (Global Public Health Vigilance: Creating a World on Alert. Routledge, 2010) who argue that Global Public Health Vigilance is a bio-politics that denies politics, I examine the history of Ebola and public health, the gender dimensions of the disease and the ways in which the actions of Liberian communities ended the outbreak. In light of some of the lessons we have learned from the Ebola outbreak, I argue that we need much more capacious understandings of capacity and expertise to create a resilient gender justice which serves women and men both in post-conflict settings and in public health emergencies. I conclude with some pessimism about whether we are learning the most profound lessons of Ebola: That communities need to be at the centre of all public health efforts.
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Notes
- 1.
I have interviewed Liberians working in local NGOs as well as for INGOs, and some interviews with officials of leading INGOs. I am grateful to Durba Mitra for the concept of lack and lag.
- 2.
Amartya Sen developed the concept of capacity in his article ‘Equality of What?’ delivered as a Tanner lecture at Stanford in 1979. He and Martha Nussbaum developed further the idea of capacities and their importance in understanding and alleviating poverty. The capabilities approach seeks to list and therefore address all the areas of life in which people should be fulfilled, including happiness and labour, and health (Sen 1980; Nussbaum and Sen 1993).
- 3.
See for example the United Nations Development Program, Strategic Plan (2008–2011) and the UNDP (2009, 5) Capacity Development Primer which identifies capacity development as ‘the engine of human development.’ The World Bank has a Capacity Development Resource Center which ‘aims to be a connector of knowledge, learning, and innovation in capacity development for the benefit of the development community and results-oriented practice’ (World Bank 2016).
- 4.
CDRF targets societies for reform so that they become better candidates for capacity development. ‘Capacity development is a locally driven process of learning by leaders, coalitions and other agents of change that brings about changes in sociopolitical, policy-related, and organisational factors to enhance local ownership for and the effectiveness and efficiency of efforts to achieve a development goal’ (Otoo et al. 2009, 3).
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Scully, P. (2019). Ebola and Post-Conflict Gender Justice: Lessons from Liberia. In: Shackel, R., Fiske, L. (eds) Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice. Gender, Development and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77890-7_3
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