 Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Alan Knight and I've been asked to start this session. Why am I here and why am I particularly interested in this discussion on Ebola and the publication of the Boston Consulting Groups report? I look after corporate responsibility and sustainable development for Arsenal or Middle, the large steel company, and we have a mining operation in Liberia. So last December, a year and a half ago, our risk registers were saying watch this Ebola thing and by July it was very real. And I, with a few other people in the same area, sort of recognized that whilst we were quite good at doing what we were doing in our own company, we weren't talking to our sort of peers and other companies in not only Liberia but the other affected countries in West Africa. So we convened a conversation with a few other companies and by December that conversation had merged to or had evolved organically to over 100 companies darling regularly to share notes and about 40 to 50 private sector NGOs also darling in to exchange information and become a bit of a hub to exchange information and notes and agree bilateral agreements and have a bit of a common voice on what the private sector reaction thoughts and views on the Ebola outbreak was. More importantly, there were country groups which actually coordinated real activity on the ground giving assets and everything. And I think the biggest takeaway was the private sector has an awful lot to contribute over and above a traditional sort of financial donation. Very few companies actually had an infection of Ebola in their own operations, which is obviously very different to the rest of the story. We had a lot of assets and a lot of expertise to offer. Now, what we called the Ebola private sector mobilization group was a very informal hub. And really what we're here today to talk about is what can we learn about the private sector response to Ebola in general? The thing I was involved in wasn't the only private sector response. It was just a good example of what the operators in the ground can do. And it was great that the Boston Consulting Group have given their time and support in actually producing this report on what are the lessons. And I'm now going to hand over to your moderator to actually lead this really important discussion. So thank you very much. Thanks, Ellen. And again, a warm welcome to this session on this very critical question. Not only what are the lessons from dealing with the enormous challenge from the Ebola crisis, but also how we take this forward. And we have not just assembled the report. I mean, as just Ellen said, I mean, many companies, plus, of course, government institutions, the civil society have really engaged in trying to deal with this enormous crisis. And BCG also had a team on the ground, some volunteers to help coordinate the many activities that were going on. And I think so what we want to do this afternoon is to first, of course, share the learnings from the crisis, from different perspectives. And I'll introduce the panel in a moment. And then, secondly, also talk about how do we take this forward? How do we plan for the future for future pandemics or future challenges so that we are better prepared than the last time? So let me first introduce the panel. Or let me start with me myself. I'm Hans Pavorkner. I'm the global chairman of the Boston Consulting Group. Then we have Bertrand Badre, the chief financial officer of the World Bank. We have Alan Davis, the chief executive officer of Diamonds and Minerals, the Rio Tinto. We have to my left, Saran Kaba-Jones, founder and chief executive of Face Africa. We have Paul Paulman, not yet here. I knew that the two minutes would not quite work out. The chief executive officer of Unilever. No, not yet. And then we have Mustafa Ben Bakra, the deputy permanent secretary of the president's office of Mali. I hope I got this right. Yes. Very good. So I think our focus today will be really on the partnerships. Obviously, government institutions were struggling. Companies had a vital interest, but also companies who really wanted to make a difference really shipped in and got together. There were efforts from civil society. And I think what we want to do is really to talk today about the learnings from this crisis of what works and what doesn't work. I think we need to also be quite self-critical. And then in the second part, talk about how do we take this forward and how do we prepare for future challenges. And Bertrand, why did you start from the World Bank part of you? Well, thank you. Thank you very much for inviting us to join. I mean, as you know, we are not a health organization, although we played a significant role in this crisis. I think the main lesson for me is besides everything we know about why didn't work that well about the health system in the country, about the poor coordination at the global level and so on and so forth. I think everything has been written about that. So I don't think it's a point. I think what is extremely important that it made everybody conscious that public and private can do something together. It was not really obvious before, and I think it's more and more obvious going forward. This being said, it has not been perfect. We could have done many more things together, faster, better at a bigger scale. So that's the kind of lessons we need to do going forward. We shouldn't be afraid of merging. Again, there are certain rules to respect, et cetera, but of merging efforts or converging efforts of public and private. Private in a broader sense and public in a broader sense, actually. Private with, I mean, in-country operators. I mean, the mining companies, the rubber companies, et cetera, but also the local companies. I mean, the global experts. That's very well described in your report. And also people which just want to help. So that's a broader perspective on the private sector. But in the public sector as well, it's a health specialist, health system on the ground. It's a government, the authorities, donors, partners, and the military organizations, the specialized one and the financial one like us. So I think for me, and this is probably the next step in the conversation, is to see how can we better be better prepared and better coordinated for the next one, because we know there will be a next one, a probably next once, actually. So it's very critical for me that we keep this kind of momentum that has been created by this terrible crisis to get ready for the next one without, like previously, going back to some kind of complacency, forget about all this, and move back to where we were before. So we have to maintain this momentum. I'm glad to say that we had the G7 in Dresden last week, where we discussed that. I was there with Jim Kim, and I come back on the pandemic facility that we're putting together. I have strong hopes that the G7 summit in Barbaria this week with the leaders, with the heads of state will confirm their involvement, their commitment to move forward. And then we have the G20, et cetera. So we have to maintain this, and to put this as a chapter of the bigger chapter of financing for development this year, which is also about combining public and private forces. Thanks very much. Alan, you have been on the ground, or at least your company has been on the ground. And what are the key challenges that you encountered, and what succeeded and what failed with your efforts? Well, thanks very much, Hans. It's great to be here as well. Sariatino is a global mining company, and we do have operations in West Africa. We've got 3,000 people in Guinea. So I think what actually went well is the speed of our response based on pretty well honed risk systems and crisis management systems, and business resilience. So we activated very quickly. And, of course, it's reasonably internally focused because our mission is to keep all of our employees safe and their families every day. So that worked. The safety culture was a real strength when we looked at the hygiene measures and the sharing of what was required to actually not contract Ebola. So the information sharing with the World Health Organization, the various embassies, the Doctors Without Borders, we did ramp up that reasonably quickly so that there was some shared understanding of what was going on. Now, we can always improve that very much. But that trying to get the data on what was happening, there were significant gaps developing, which did require some extraordinary action. So planning for treatment, I mean, clearly, we were praying that no one in the country or anywhere would get contracted. But if they did, we were planning contingencies. And it was extraordinarily difficult to source and understand what would happen on an insurance basis, what would happen on a repatriation basis. The nationality of people and the receiving country on the way back, that was sort of working quite live in terms of what would happen if God forbid someone did contract the Ebola that we were responsible for. And I think the other key point is our communication broadly around the organisation. There was a lot of, in a global organisation, people cared for their colleagues in Guinea. And there was a thirst for information, like what is Ebola? Is the organisation at risk? What happens when someone comes in or out of Guinea? What procedures do we have on a global basis? And there was a great caring for those colleagues that were in Guinea. So we had to ramp up communication internally, quite systematically. And we're doing a lot of work in the country. I mean, clearly the economic impacts of Ebola is very substantial. So working with the government to make sure that the impact is as limited as possible whilst allowing your people to work in safe vectors of control. That was a real learning that when you were faced with some information gaps, where is safe, where is not safe, how do you apply it? We were working on the run a little bit and clearly with our mission of keeping everyone safe, we certainly did react so that we had people out of harm's way where we could. But ramping up activity is a big learning that in our systems of resilience, we continued doing a lot of work where we could move work around. We did that very rapidly. We had to establish an office in London to receive some of that work so that we could continue going. I think we did that reasonably effectively, but there's lots more to learn from something as tragic and sort of deeply affecting what is and has happened with the Ebola. Okay. Thank you very much. Sir Ryan, what was your role and the role of face of Africa? Great. Well, thanks for having me here. Face Africa had been operating in Liberia for the last five to six years, mainly focused on delivering water and sanitation in remote rural communities and in fact in communities that are quite similar to where Ebola started from. Remote, rural, isolated, no telecommunication infrastructure, certainly no healthcare system. When the outbreak started to intensify in July, we suspended all of our wash operations and went into full Ebola response mode. And we had a number of goals to stop the spread of the virus, to support frontline efforts, to ensure that we were still delivering essential services like water and sanitation with a particular focus on hygiene and also strengthening local capacity. How were we able to do this? We were quite successful, mainly because we were able to leverage the local expertise that we had, the trust that we had built from working in those communities for the last five, six years, but also more importantly, plugging into the systems that already existed, the local health teams that were already there, the regional health system that already existed. Yes, they were there, but they lacked resources, they lacked capacity, there were no ambulances, there were no PPEs in the regions where we worked, personal protective equipment, so that doctors and nurses can be safe from contracting the virus. And so we were working in an environment that lacked all the basic necessities to prevent this virus from spreading. And so what we went in was basically to try and prevent the spread of this virus by focusing on community mobilization, on education, on prevention methods, and we were able to do this effectively because we had the trust of the locals. And I think that's extremely important when you're trying to combat an epidemic like this. Mustafa, you prevented, or Mali prevented Ebola to come into the country. You know, what were the measures that you were taking? Thank you very much. I think we have been able to prevent Ebola. Actually, we did had some cases in Mali, but we have been able to prevent the propagation of the disease because we have benefited from the experience of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. And Bamako, the main city, is just 200 kilometers from the Guinea borders where actually all the mining companies are located. So we have benefited from, unfortunately, this bad experience from Guinea that helped us better prevent the disease. But what actually in Mali we have learned from this Ebola disease? There are three things. First, the vulnerability of our health system. We have been investing a lot of funds in the health system for the last couple of decades. However, we have seen that with Ebola crisis we have not been able efficiently to address this disease. Secondly, the original cooperation, as you may know, in West African countries, the borders, there is actually no control surveillance on the borders. So then we have to work state with state on a regional basis to better address those diseases. And second and thirdly, the use of funds put in the health system. How can we efficiently use those funds to instead of always working on the emergency, such as the disease that we are addressing, such as malaria, which is actually killing more people than what Ebola can do in a year, HIV, more present also in the mining sectors. I mean, Rio Tinto can maybe concur on that. And all those three aspects actually tells us that we have a problem in our health system. We are not able to be in a prevention mode. How can we prevent the next disease, what will be the next pandemic? Do we have a regulatory framework in which we can see, yes, if there's another disease, we'll be able to prevent. So in that case, how actually we have been able to overcome the Ebola disease. We work with the private sector, but you have to understand something. Rio Tinto is the big mining companies. Most of the private sector in Africa, in Western Africa, there are small companies, SMEs, they don't have enough funds, they don't have enough capacities to address and to be more sensibilized on all those diseases. That was really a big challenge. However, in the case of Mali, we had since 2011 a private sector coalition that actually sensibilized the private sectors on malaria and HIV, since those are the main disease of which we are, the private sector is affected. So this coalition already exists. And then when the Ebola came in, so they just at the time I was minister in charge of private sector, so I was more comfortable on working with the private sector and see how we can better address and the companies in sensibilization, in sanitation equipment, even the private sector provide themselves to the government, to the villages that are around Guinea or actually they are more affected. But the part of Mali that was really affected by Ebola was really Bamako because just close to Guinea. And a lot of things that would like to say it's our development partners. And thanks to the World Bank President, Dr. Kim, because if he wasn't because he's a physician, he knows what is epidemics, he knows what is HIV, he knows what is Ebola. Hopefully he was there when Ebola crisis came. So he actually, he has been able to mobilize all the donors to help the Western African country if Dr. Kim was not present at that moment. I don't know what actually would have happened to those countries. And also the World Health Organization actually who actually help Mali and other countries to try to overcome those diseases. But now in Africa, in Western Africa, we have to be, to see how we can maybe prevent the next, the next pandemic. That's why we have launched an initiative in Mali that's on which we are working on, to the sanitary, I don't know the word in English, security sanitary, I don't know how to translate it in English. So that which actually will be to only prevent all the pandemics, the next pandemics because we know that people are traveling a lot. So sometimes also we have to look at the disease for the animals. Sometimes can transfer from animals to human. So that's actually where we are at the moment in Mali. I would like to also draw in the audience, you know, focusing and get their questions on what has worked and what has failed. But I would like to ask Alan and also Saran about, you know, when you said you were taking certain measures that was around the employees plus their families in the region that we were working. And maybe or even including the villages. Yes. Yeah. Well, certainly initially when you sort of move into the response, it is your local employees is the first, first sort of influencing group. And then it builds in concentric circles. But we had set up a system of SMS. So quite a sophisticated. So we could communicate with all of our employees pretty much immediately. We could communicate with our employees pretty much immediately, which then we brought their families in so that their responsible was also with their families, the villages and the communities. And then every part of the community that we interface with, including government departments. So the hygiene procedures, for example, and temperature control was rolled out progressively throughout the presidency, the ministries, so that there was in fact some coordination right across Conakry and through to the areas where it was. Saran, you talked about working, having worked in some rural areas in Liberia for quite a number of years. So did your efforts really focus on those rural areas? Or how did you, how did you focus? Yes, we were focused mainly on the areas where we had been operating because it was extremely important for us to be able to leverage sort of the experience and the relationships that we had built with these communities. I'm not sure if you remember, but in some parts of Guinea, there were healthcare workers and volunteers who lost their lives, but mainly because they were going into these communities and doing Ebola prevention and awareness work, but they were newcomers. They had no relationships to these people in communities. And so it was really difficult for people to accept the message and you had this compounding fear of foreigners coming in and bringing and actually bringing and spreading Ebola. So for us, we were able to avoid that issue by strictly working in communities where we already had a presence. Okay. Now questions from the audience. First on the, you know, what, sharing the learnings, what works, what doesn't work. Any questions? And please, you know, introduce yourself and be short and sharp in your question over there. I'm Mohamed Ujalo, Global Shepherds Guinea Conakry. First of all, I'm very happy to be here and congratulations, many thanks for the private efforts, especially Rio Tinto. Ebola started in my country Guinea and it's sad to say, but my question is, how can we bring more institution, international organization, to support those countries like my country Guinea? Thank you. My name is Yvonne Chaka-Chaka, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and from the Princess of Africa Foundation. What were the lessons learned from Ebola? From all spheres, business, countries and governments. OK. Good afternoon. My name is Alessandro Segwar. I'm the director of Africa International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Society. Thank you very much to the panelists and to the team that is sitting before us and their contributions. We have seen good collaboration in the three countries because, as you know, Red Cross has been one of the key players in Ebola and we are still in. I would like to ask a question relating to, I mean, today we are not out of the woods yet. So we cannot celebrate because as long as there's Ebola in Guinea and Sierra Leone, it will remain a challenge and a lot more work has to be done. So I'm asking, what are your plans in terms of both in terms of recovery, but also building resilience for communities and surveillance systems? I think this needs partnership from all of us in terms of both building resilience, but also building strong surveillance system. The reason why I'm saying this is that everybody talks about health infrastructure is responsible, partly responsible for what happened. Weak infrastructure. So I hope everybody, we are now going to focus on infrastructure and not focusing on working with communities, building their resilience, but also building community surveillance systems. Thank you. Any other, please, over there. No, no, with the mic, with the mic. Otherwise, we will not hear you. Sorry. All right, thank you. My name is Chinya Lu Amambo. I'm from Nigeria. And my question has to do with coordination of efforts. One of the challenges that we faced in Nigeria when we had Ebola was a lot of people were concerned, both from the private sector and from government. But the challenge was, how do you coordinate all of this effort so that it can be efficient? And I would like to hear from the experiences of, I think one of the speakers spoke about a private public sector coordination. What were the details of the coordination that was done? Thank you. But I think, you know, sorry, one last question. Yes, please. Thank you very much. Vivien Liu from Singapore, Philanthropy Works, and one of the young global leaders. I actually served with Doctors Without Borders in Liberia as well, pre-Ebola. So very close to my heart. My question pertains to, well, it will combine lessons learned, but applied to a major city like Lagos. So imagine if you ran, if you hated the Nigerian government and you had to deal with Ebola preparations, what key insights would you leverage to prepare to mitigate this disaster? Thank you. Very good. I think, you know, the, as I said at the beginning, I think the second step, and then of course, you know, sharing the learnings, one thing, but really, how do we take this forward? And what are we doing concretely now? Not just to say, OK, it was a disaster. We have almost survived. But there will be other Ebola outbreaks or outbreaks of other diseases coming. It's, no matter how careful we are, I think it will certainly happen. The question is, how do we take this now forward? How do we address the issues of the various countries? But also, I think, what are the lessons learned for other countries who have been spared this time? And I would like to start with Paul. Thank you for joining. Sorry about that. It's a polite to leave a meeting with Summar. Yeah, no, no, I understand that. Sorry, I mean, it was tied to me. But I think, you know, as we discussed earlier this morning, I think, you know, how do we take this to the next level? How do we prepare? And also, I think, how do we help those countries who have been infected, I think, going forward? Yeah. So I think the main thing, and again, I apologize. I don't know what has been sent already, but we organized when Jim Kim called and said we need to do something. And he was very much looking at it from the World Bank point of view. We need to bring the right people together. And Bert Holm was there and many others in figuring out what the learnings are from Ebola. Because very quickly, the private sector came up with about 500 million, half a billion in money. But then everybody felt at a certain level of frustration that we were not prepared for this, like many of the other things that were happening in the world. And the discussion brought me back to something I had at that time, Bishor Satsir, and who was leading the World Food Program, that we didn't even have a global mapping on nutritional profiles or emergency response in case these things would happen. So that brought us together in the web in January. That led to the BCG study, which I think is a very good study on the learnings. But they're only as felt as we want to put it in action. I think the way that this proposes is to look really at there is no replacement anywhere, even in business for ourselves, to first of all be prepared, get the scenarios going, and they need to happen at the country level, then at the regional level, and some of that needs to be done globally. So this preparedness is very important. We as a company will have emergency plans for any of our 500 factories or for any country being with a flooding or an earthquake. And so you need to have that book will never be perfect, but that book will certainly help you. Then we need to have response systems in place that you know who does what, who takes decisions. And then the last thing, which is often missing, is the world has now so many crises, and you basically go from one month to another that there is a fatigue that sets in after about two minutes. So the rehabilitation plans are equally important. We thought it would be a good idea to look at different types of disasters that you have. You have political upheaval disasters that need a certain type of response and specific measures. You have public health issues or pandemics that we're now talking. They need a different type of response. Then you have issues like natural disasters, increasingly the effects of climate change are becoming apparent. So how do we deal with those? And the last bucket, you could call things like Nepal, which are these one off totally unforeseen people called them black swans or whatever. And for each of these, we need to start to think about how we move it forward. Now, one of the suggestions which business very much likes because there's an enormous appetite for business to participate. They have the funds, the expertise and all that. But if you talk about public health, the first thing is never to abdicate the responsibilities of the government. You have to put that into government control. You don't want to privatize all of these issues. So putting identifying, in this case, we're in Africa, identifying two or three countries where the work could be started, where we bring, actually, the right people together. And we've obviously all have our favorite countries. But it would be great if at the end of this week, even we could say, we take Liberia, and I know Mr. Saliv is very keen on looking at something more systematic, or we take Nigeria as a country that has been mentioned and say, can we create the right group of people across these multiple parties that can align on objectives, that can build a trust, that can share each other's expertise so that we have a draft plan on what this looks like. I've talked to Claude Swap as well again this morning, going into this session. And we have created an offer at the World Economic Forum to deal with the issue of deforestation, which is a tremendous other issue. But they created the office for the Tropical Forest Alliance. It would be good in the web, which is, after all, a convening forum to create a small office with support of some of the governments to create a small coordinating office that could then start working with these one or two or three countries. Get some experience, be very practical. We can get a lot done in terms of playbooks in the next six to nine months and use that learning to see if we would be able to scale it up. Business is ready to help. There is no doubt about that. We had 120 businesses that jumped on it, obviously too many that we all could handle. But business is ready to do that. I know many of the organizations like the World Bank and many others are eager to help. So for me, that would be a very practical way forward. Bertrand, picking up the ball, you know, obviously the World Bank has a lot of experience in coordinating big projects. How do you see the World Bank taking this forward and connecting with the countries and the private institutions? Let me just come back a little bit on what you said. Last year, we mobilized money early August. It's always at the moment where everybody is in vacation, et cetera. So but we were able to, once the decision by Jim was made, we were able to mobilize half a billion in nine days. So when there is a real crisis, the system can work. The issue is to make it work permanently and not to create, to reinvent the wheel every time you have a crisis. So that's exactly the point. And you have to manage different aspects. The first one is to provide funding to cope with a crisis, a humanitarian disaster and also to keep the momentum, to keep also for development after the disaster, the recovery, et cetera. When there is this fatigue and people say, what about raising more money, et cetera. So the first point is really to be able to play on the different aspects of this and to coordinate everybody. Because as you say, there were a lot of money at the end, which was mobilized. I'm not sure that in two or three years, when you look at how the money was mobilized, spent, et cetera, we'll be totally happy with what happened. So if we project ourselves in the future, I will echo what Paul said. We have several things that we need to prepare. And I understand that we need to prepare it at a small scale, but I think scale is of the essence because the pandemic can be anywhere. I mean, we have issues in Korea today. There are rumors of new diseases in America. I mean, every time you have this new thing, it can be anywhere in Africa and elsewhere as well. So you need to be global at a certain stage. So preparedness is of the essence. And what we've realized is that the health system where there's a weak link in all this. Maybe one of the issues that we've spent a lot of time and money on having a vertical approach to health issue, to the detriment of health system. So we have to rebalance this. And this is our daily job. I mean, as part of our development funding policy, we need to work as others on funding health system to make sure you have surveillance system, you have workers in communities, et cetera, so that we know what's going on. That was one of the, that's really the underlying building block. Second, we already, as Paul said, to prepare books or off the shelf, you know, a 911 member, we say, okay, if this happens, we know that any lever is ready to do that. We know that Kyoto is ready to do that. We know that UPS is ready to do that. We know that Vodafone is ready to provide self, et cetera. We know what WHO, and we need to work on this. And again, private-public combination. I think it's extremely, it's extremely important. And of course we need money. And that's where, again, the combination of public and private effort is important. That's where we are pushing, and we've been mandated to do that, for an insurance type of mechanism. So I know people are a little bit reluctant. And I've heard, first of all, many people don't like insurance as a matter of fact, because they say, you know, these contracts, we never can read them, and when you have a problem, they don't pay. So you have to convince them that, no, sometimes it does work. Second, the premium will be mostly paid by donors. And it's difficult to convince a donor to pay for an insurance, because then you cannot put your flag on an insurance premium. It's very difficult. I mean, you can put your flag on the road, on the school, on the hospital, et cetera. I mean, if nothing happened, the insurance premium is gone. And you don't see anything. And same on the recipient side. I mean, I prefer to have the money than to have somebody pay for a premium. So you have some education to bring. And of course, you have the issue of the price, because as we all know, an insurance premium always look pretty expensive before the accident. So again, this is the type of thing we have to prepare. But bottom line, I'm convinced, and we've been working pretty fast and at a faster speed, actually, than I expected with the insurance sector, with the larger insurance companies, with some modeling companies, et cetera. What is the basic idea? It's not to insure the people or the infrastructure. It's to make sure that once we trigger, so in the case of Ebola, if we had reached that point in March or April and not in July or August, the cost would have been way lower, as we all know. So once you trigger, then the insurance pays, and you can use this money to fund all the contribution of, whether it's a UN agency, WHO, some support to private sector, et cetera. So if you pay several dozens of millions of dollars of premium per annum at the global level, then you can mobilize immediately three, four, 500 million when something happens. This is the type of order of magnitude that we're talking about, with DCCs coming every five, 10, or 30 years, depending on how you calibrate this. And I finish with that, the very important point is that if you bring the discipline of this type of approach, the discipline of insurance mechanism, and this is what triggers the interest of Minister of Finance, you have a feedback loop between the level of preparation of preparedness and the price you pay. It's like an insurance. I mean, if you're insuring a factory and you don't have any sprinkler, you pay high. If you put sprinkler, then the premium goes down. So it's exactly this mechanism that we want to have. So we would like every country that is part of this mechanism to add there to some preparedness standards that we bring to the insurance pool, and they get to say, okay, well, the world is better prepared now, so we can lower the insurance premium. So it looks a little bit science fiction, as I say, but it's not science fiction. I mean, we are really working on real models, et cetera. Strong interest from the Minister of Finance, they know something will happen. They know it will cost a lot of money, and they know the sooner we react, the cheaper it is. It's as simple as that. And the discipline is very attractive to them. Mustafa, I turn it to you. So two questions to you. Is Mali now preparing a plan, just in case to be prepared? Who is doing what? Who is connecting? And the second thing, what do you think about the insurance scheme? Would Mali be willing to pay into that? Thank you. Actually, we already have a system in place right now, following the first case. Actually, before the first case, we were through the Minister of Health and also through the President's office, because the Ebola crisis was really looked at by the President himself, because of all the consequences. And we now knew that through this crisis that those kinds of pandemics and diseases are now models of national security. For those reasons now, we have to put in place a center of emergency, Sainte d'Opération d'urgence in French. I don't know how to translate it in English. So we actually will be providing first training to improve building capacities, but also surveillance of the borders inside also, and to look at anything that can have impact on the economy through diseases, on any type actually. So this bureau, if I can say, of emergency, we are working on it, so that we can create it, and then it can be put in place by, I hope by the end of this year. And for that, we will need the help of the donors, the help of the private sectors, because everybody should know what to do and how we can react, instead of being always reacting to crisis, but we have to be more proactive. And that's actually what we learned the most in this crisis. So regarding the insurance, I actually didn't think about that for the disease and pandemics. Money is already in the process of paying an insurance for the CCRS. I don't know how do you say it in the... Draught, yes. For drought, through the African Union initiative, African risk capacity, when you pay a premium, and if you have drought, then you will get money for resilience. So yes, this idea, but I think there's an idea that actually Paul Pullman brought earlier. I think this is really interesting to know how maybe to take some pilot countries and to see how maybe we can collaborate and Marley's candidate for that. Okay, so we can maybe have a discussion about it later. I apologize. Oh, good. Even better. Good. And Alan, I mean, you talked about your crisis plan for Rio Tinto earlier. That was it. Obviously, you know, you have experience, I think, in helping governments to develop those, building on your experience, your plans. How do you feel about that in Guinea? For example, you could help the government with your plans, making it work. Absolutely, Hans. Well, when I look at some of the real lessons learned, is there was a rapid response, but not a holistic rapid response. So the gap that was created was the companies with their own vector type systems, managed to get it under control rapidly. But then when you add the concentric circles on, so that it's actually a community or a country that has the same rapid type of response, you recall that, you know, it did. There was an escalation of infections that happened that it took the global community quite a while then to get on top of. So that, to me, is a great opportunity, to have crisis systems that operate country-wide and as part of the national response infrastructure, which of course is twinned with a responsive healthcare system, which can't be avoided. But I totally agree that that is something that can be shared. And Siran, how do you see, you know, you being involved in these crisis plans or pre-crisis plans, how could that work out? I mean, given that you're focusing on specific rural areas, which is obviously very important because very often people would probably focus more on the capital city and major places, but obviously connecting, you know, also the rural areas is very important in that. Absolutely, and I did want to just mention that I agree we should be global in our thinking, but local in our execution. And I wanted to address one of the gentleman's question on resiliency, because I think that's important. There was a lot of focus on rebuilding healthcare systems and the physical infrastructure aspect of that. But I don't think that that's sustainable and I think we really need to look into plugging into existing systems and working within civil society and local groups because, for example, you can build all the, even while the Ebola crisis was raging, the United States spent almost a billion dollars building Ebola treatment units. And none of those units went up while the outbreak was at its peak. The units were actually completed when the number of cases started to go down rapidly. And that was happening because librarians and people and communities themselves started to take matters into their own hands. And I don't think we should dismiss that. I think it's extremely important that whatever we do, we look at plugging into those existing systems and really work with communities and people. Otherwise you can build all the hospitals you want, but if people are not educated, if there are no roads, if there are no infrastructure for them to actually get there, then it's all in vain. I'm sure when Paul, when you mentioned earlier, having a plan for a country, it's not just the physical infrastructure. It's also making sure that you really connect the many dots because otherwise it's really not the plan. It really is only a partial solution. Right, it's very difficult to get the business community to make detailed plans for every country on the ground to make that possible, whilst I 100% agree with you, ultimately what counts is what you do in the needs of the countries. But from a practical level is there is a lot you can do with the higher returns are in the area of prevention and preparedness. It's better always to do your exercise than to deal with these issues of obesity. And that's the same with everything else. So getting people to spend money on the prevention and preparedness has a multiplier of seven to 10 times. And what the business community, obviously not having the capacity to be in the odd 200 countries is, you can definitely scale up things by region and built in capabilities. So you take a company like mine, a Unilever, you can have an emergency plan for West Africa and say if something happens, how do we see very quickly where the trucks are, where our healthcare workers are, where the food is located so that we can reallocate it to that country. But to get a lot of attention from business very practically at this point in time to make detailed plans by country when they are theoretical exercises and hopefully never have to be used, will be very difficult. But in order to make these regional plans and then ultimately scaling it up globally in mechanisms that are more galvanizing like the insurance thing we've all talked, you need to do some test cases in two or three countries. And I think Mali would be, obviously West Africa has a lot of attention right now for good reasons and Mali would be a good country and if we can add one or two other ones, what did the Ivory Coast do well to keep it outside of the borders? How did Nigeria bring it quickly on the control when they had a few cases? I think those are the few countries we need to learn from and then scale it up. But at the same time, look at other disasters. There are two things that haven't been mentioned, I don't know if you did before, but because we can all say that there were no plans, there was no understanding, there was no trust. So all these things that went there is a little bit exaggerated. At the end of the day, I think the world again rose to the challenge of humanity. But again, we always have to set the bar higher. But the two things I wanted to stress is why we have to prepare it is there are a lot of issues that are there if people work together that are falling short because of a lack of trust. And nothing better than sitting together, preparing these things, talking about it, when you don't have the disasters. When we sit together with PSI or with UNICEF or with Oxfam or others, we spend a lot of time trying to talk to each other, understanding each other's objectives and aligning and building that trust, which ultimately is that basis for prosperity and obviously you're a good example of that. And the population service international by the SPSI. And the other one is data. There was a clear lack of willingness to share data or ability to have data. And the community, including the private sector, cannot respond if you don't have the facts. We were sending two and a half million pieces of bar soap and detergents because hygiene is obviously a big thing and if you can get the habit change. But there was no data where it needed to go, what was able to, who was able to deal with it? How do you get it to the places that people are capable of distributing it to your point? So having systems that are far more transparent where governments also don't see this as the biggest threat to their tourism or their investments, which definitely was the case in West Africa. So making data public to drive the right decisions, building that trust on two other things I just wanted to stress once more. Very good. Ellen, do you want to add maybe two, I think that the steps forward, given that you have been so heavily involved in dealing with the issues? Yeah, I think this has been a great discussion. I think one discussion we need to have sort of building on Paul's point where there isn't a crisis is the movement of people across borders. When I was sort of chairing that mobilisation group with the private sector, I was shocked how much time we spent about what we do with expats who contract the disease, and Alan, you referred to it as well. And one of the learnings for me is there is no international agreement on what happens. You know, I sort of consciously sort of say, if I'm aboard and I get caught carrying drugs, I know what my rights are. If I get contagious disease when I'm aboard, I don't know what my rights are. And I think this is a really good time now because it made it very difficult for us to get volunteers and employees into the country to help. So if there's one output, it's almost a convention on what do we do, it would be fantastic. I don't know how that happens, but it would be great if we could make it happen. I think the other point is, as well as about the network of companies. I mean, the hard work was done by the individual companies and you've heard a great case study with Rio. But the network we create where people could share notes was particularly useful, not for us, because we're already there. There's companies who are court short. And so that sort of informal network to bring the other companies up to speed. Because one trick is that employees are also citizens and Alan's concentric circles is great. Imagine a map with all the private sectors with those concentric circles. We're reaching a large proportion of the population because they work for the private sector. The network I created was useful, but it was a bit ad hoc and it didn't really have a back worm. So there was more of an institutional home to make it quicker and slicker and happen quicker with more resources to follow up the conclusions of the good discussions we're having over the phone. That would be great. And I think there's an idea with the forum to actually be a bit more of a back room for that. But it's really good and all credit to everybody and your report that it feels like there's all appetite. We're not letting this go as something which happened last year. And I've got a real sense of confidence that these lessons will be caught and will be used. And that's fantastic because that will save lives. Very good. So the audience, let's, we have here and here. Thank you very much. I'm Carl Hoffman from PSI. Thank you, Paul, for mentioning us and we're proud of our partnership with Unilever. I wanted to just, I guess, just get the reaction of the panel to something that Mustafa has said a couple of times. We know the importance of health systems strengthening in many contexts. It's a profoundly important concept and it's a very unsexy concept. It's hard to mobilize resources for it. We see the attractiveness of verticality as opposed to horizontality, if I can say it that way. But you talked several times about how Mali looks at this as a national security issue. And it's very tempting to use the national security argument as a way to try and mobilize resources for something that's otherwise not very attractive. I just would like to get people's reaction to the plus and minuses of that. Let's collect some more other thoughts and then we'll follow up on that. Ronald de Jong with Royal Philips. We have been involved in the Ebola response both via the Philips Foundation as well as also by providing medical equipment. What I very much like in the discussion is the notion of strengthening communities and the resilience of communities. What I also very much like is the fact that we should look at the entire continuum of care not only taking care of the people that are sick but also prevent and do early detection. I would like to point out that modern technology can play an enormous role there to enable all of that connectivity, digitization. And basically I would like to build upon the point that Mr. Paulman made. I think it would be great if as an outcome of this session there would be a tangible proposal where a couple of parties joined forces to organize this pilot to prove the concept. Then we would go beyond exchanging opinions and statements of intent and my company would very much be willing to be one of the, let's say, parties to take that initiative. Very good. Appreciate it. Thank you. Two more behind. And then we'll respond and we'll be up after this. My name is Putnamani Mloja from the Palauio hub in Zimbabwe. I'm a global shaper. There is a documentary that I came across where this person was interviewing the people in the villages that were affected directly by the Ebola virus that was in Liberia. And these people were saying, we hear that funds are being collected to combat this epidemic but the funds are not actually getting to us. We're not seeing the efficiency of those funds. I'm not sure if anything was learned from the people that were dealing directly with the epidemic, if there is anything that you learn from that epidemic to make sure that the funds are used efficiently. Because especially the fact that we've talked that there has to be collaboration between the public and the private sector. But then there's usually a problem when working with governments because governments may look at it from a different perspective, from the way companies, the private sector look at it. And then the last one over there, sorry. My name is Gudwul Shana. I'm the vice president of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa. Just maybe just two observations from the previous speaker, escalating the learnings into something tangible around PPP's private public partnerships. Would it not be a good idea to set up centers of epidemiology in areas where epidemics have happened before? I think there's already demonstrated ability to raise money. Would that money not be better used to set centers of epidemiology so that we've got surveillance, early warning systems, and an ability to research and respond so that we are not again doing into this hand huddle of excited activity when another epidemic? One of the deep areas of Africa is that we do not have centers of epidemiology or research that can quickly pick up and track things. Then we'll have a, no, the last one over there. We cannot, we have to stop now. My name is Mutala Mohamed Kamara. I'm a global shepard from the Free Town Hub. I just want to observe a very short point from what my fellow global shepard said. What works and what doesn't work? He just gave us the actual, the true picture of what is happening in places like Sierra Leone and Liberia. I'm coming from a country that is one of the hardest hit. We are still grappling with and finding solutions so Ebola is still there. We are still finding solutions. But providing funds, it's not just about them providing money. It's about accountability. There is this talk of them, misuse of them, these Ebola funds. It is not actually impacting the lives of them, communities and things like that. So I just want to caution donors. It's not just about them providing funds. It's about also making sure that these funds actually impact the people that are affected. There was a lady over there. Sorry, over there. Unfortunately, she's the last one because we need to close. Hi, everyone. Thank you. My name is Nadia from an organization called Saim Dabi. We operate in Liberia and we were part of the Ebola response. We worked together with IFRC and a few other organizations. I think it's very critical for us to look at the crisis throughout. So while organizations are looking at focusing on prevention and actual response, I think it's equally important for each actor and each stakeholder within this whole crisis to also look at management and rehabilitation of these communities if we're really talking about building resilience. And the thing that I've not heard of right now and perhaps it's a bigger picture that we also have to think about is the issue of stigma. I think in a lot of countries where Ebola survivors have actually survived what they are now facing with and these can be part of our community members or God forbid, also our employees, how do they continue their lives post-Ebola, during Ebola and how do they continue throughout? Thank you. Thank you very much. So I think very, a lot of good comments and questions and also suggestions. I think one of the key elements I think going back to what you said, making health a really critical issue for the well-being of countries. When I think Prime Minister Modi in India said we need more toilets than temples, I think he pushes it very clearly because hygiene is critical for the health of people and it's not just hygiene when there's an epidemic. It's hygiene every day because it really prevents people from developing, children from getting their full potential and people from developing in a healthy way. I think that needs to be part of the focus that we create. I think in addition, the issue of where to spend the money, how to spend the money and so forth, I think again that should be part of the plan, not just preventing disease from happening, doing the crisis, but also then how to deal with the aftermath, how to make sure that you rebuild communities, how to create the resilience that you mentioned and I think it's very important that we look at the whole supply chain, so to speak, before, during and after and what Paul has mentioned, I think really doing this for two, three countries in preparing this now, even though of course it will never be perfect, there will be always surprises, but I think that will be the key now that we take this forward, the report that will come out later today is just the first step. So I think we should not be satisfied with the report. But I think what will happen is that the task force will continue to work together, hopefully find two, three countries to really prepare such a plan, but starting ideally also on preventing things from happening, how can we do best prevent things from happening so that we don't have to deal with the epidemic, but if they are happening, then we can really find a good response and also I think and some of you have mentioned how do we deal with the aftermath? Because if the attention goes away, the people still have to deal with the damage that has been done to their lives, to their families, to their communities, and I think that should be part of the overall package because otherwise we will not effectively deal with the epidemics. So thank you all very much for a good discussion. As I said, the report will come out later today, but I think the key issue is really to move this into the task force that will really come up with specific actions, with preparing plans, and then make sure that we do learn from this rather than saying, okay, this was a one-off and then let things go. We need to continue to be really vigilant and make sure that things are happening now and hopefully find two, three countries that are willing and engaged to prepare the plans. Thank you very much.