On 20 and 21 March 2023, the ARC Group’s Gender and Outbreaks & Epidemics (O&E) teams and the West & Central Africa Office, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations (BMGF), convened the West Africa Regional Consultation on gender-responsive mechanisms for epidemic preparedness in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Dakar, Senegal. The Regional Consultation followed the December 2022 launch of the ARC Group’s O&E product, where the Government of Senegal became the first country to take out the sovereign parametric insurance policy for protecting its populations against high-impact disease outbreaks. The ARC O&E Programme’s risk-transfer solution is the first African epidemic risk insurance mechanism designed to enable rapid country-led responses to disease outbreaks and epidemics and prevent the further spread of such threats.

The ARC O&E Programme, born in the wake of the devastating 2014-2016 West African Ebola crisis, and developed in response to a request from African Ministers of Finance under the auspices of the African Union (AU), uses a comprehensive multi-pronged approach to country preparedness and response to O&E : in-country capacity-building work on epidemic preparedness ; contingency planning to enable timely and effective response when an outbreak occurs ; outbreak modelling to compute risk analytics from realistically simulated outbreaks events ; and a risk transfer parametric product that covers early response costs of an outbreak. The O&E risk transfer product initially covers three diseases of epidemic potential, Ebola, Marburg, and meningitis, with a view to expanding based on assessed needs in member states.

On 28 November 2022, ARC Agency and the BMGF signed an investment grant agreement on “Gender Responsive Mechanisms for Epidemic Preparedness in ECOWAS” to support six priority member countries of the ECOWAS to provide rapid and appropriate gender-sensitive responses to disease outbreaks and epidemics in the region. The six ECOWAS countries have been prioritised to benefit from this project : Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. Towards the fulfilment of this agreement, this Regional Consultation was the start of the ARC-BGMF project, with key objectives being :

• Building the capacity of ECOWAS member states to better respond to disease outbreaks and epidemics ;
• Promoting gender-sensitive mechanisms for disease outbreaks and epidemics management ;
• Providing technical support and outreach activities on the Polio virus in West Africa ; and
• Strengthening innovative partnerships in promoting Pan-African and sub-regional collaboration.
• Responding to outbreaks and epidemics must be inclusive to achieve true resilience. As part of the ARC’s goal to mainstream gender in all its programmes and the Disaster Risk Management (DRM) environment at large, this project will be intentional in driving for gender equality to ensure that no one is left behind, starting with understanding the gender considerations of each participating country through a gender analysis.