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La Réponse face à l’échec de réintégration des survivants d’Ebola

Bienvenu Mukungilwa

This is the fourth of four Suluhu Working Papers analysing the Ebola response in eastern Congo 2018–2020.

You can download the full paper in French here. Below is the paper’s English abstract.

This article on post-Ebola social and structural reintegration challenges analyses the problems faced by survivors of

the tenth epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from August 2018 to June 2020. It argues that the

continued exclusion of survivors from society stems from coercive policies and tactics put in place by the Ebola

Response and which have contributed to its overall ineffectiveness. This had led specifically to the reinforcement of

the stigma of survivors, dependent on a Response that ended up exploiting them despite their significant contribution

in the fight against the epidemic. Based on fieldwork with survivors in Butembo and Beni and a review of the literature

on the epidemic and the Congolese crisis, it emerges that successful reintegration of survivors can be seen as a unit of

measure for the overall success of the response; and that for integration to be successful, the Response should in future

rethink its goal zero cases oriented only to the cured and instead adopt a more community-centred approach.