The outbreak of Ebola in Liberia is officially over. On Saturday 9 May, the World Health Organisation declared the country Ebola-free, marking 42 days since the burial of the last confirmed case of the deadly disease.
Liberia suffered the highest number of deaths of any country affected by the outbreak, with over 4,700 Liberians dying of Ebola since March 2014. At the peak of the epidemic, which occurred during August and September last year, the country was reporting 300 to 400 new cases every week.
Liberia’s last case of Ebola was a woman in the greater Monrovia (Liberia’s capital) area who developed symptoms on 20 March and died on 27 March. More than 300 people who had close contact with the woman were closely monitored but have all since been cleared. While Liberia has been declared Ebola-free, neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone continue to battle the outbreak, so there is a risk that infected people could cross into Liberia over the region’s extremely porous borders. The country has now entered a three-month period of heightened vigilance.
ChildFund’s emergency response has been focused on the care and support of children orphaned by Ebola. Through the establishment of interim care centres (ICC) in Liberia and Sierra Leone, children are provided with food, shelter, medical care and psychosocial support for a 21-day quarantine period, during which time efforts are also made to find relatives or foster families who will accept these children and provide them with a new home. In Liberia, centres were established in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in the cities of Monrovia, Kakata and Ganta, just south of the Guinea border.
Schools in Sierra Leone have finally reopened, after nine months of closure due to the Ebola crisis. This means education has now resumed in all three Ebola-affected countries, after Guinea reopened schools in January, followed by Liberia in February.
ChildFund Sierra Leone is working in partnership with the Department of Health and Education and the Ministry of Social Welfare to implement the infection prevention and control standards necessary to protect children returning to school.
To date, ChildFund has helped reopen 185 schools in Sierra Leone, including distribution of cleaning agents to decontaminate classrooms (which were used as holding centres for suspected Ebola patients during the crisis), training teachers and students in Ebola prevention, supplying hand-washing stations and hygiene kits, and providing text books.
“All schools in our partner communities have reopened,” confirms Yusufu Kamara, program manager at ChildFund Sierra Leone. “However, the turnout is not encouraging as most pupils still fear Ebola transmission since there are still isolated cases being reported.”
For those children who have returned, he says: “They are happy to see their friends who they have missed for quite a long time but they are also sad for those they have lost to Ebola.”
There is still much more to be done to provide schools with the resources they need and to help children readjust to being back in a learning environment. Yusufu says it will take some time for the situation to return to normal.
“Some children are in school without uniforms because those who are coming from Ebola-affected homes had their clothes burnt,” he says. “Some of the schools used as holding centres in the communities had their furniture destroyed. And there is an urgent need to provide water and sanitation facilities, as well as more hygiene kits, to those schools that have not yet received support.”
