The World Bank has launched Pandemic Emergency Finance Facility

The World Bank Group has launched Pandemic Emergency Finance Facility a new financing mechanism to quickly mobilize funds to tackle global disease outbreaks and create a new insurance market for pandemic risk.

•    PEF is expected to bring the much needed coordination and speed for future global disease outbreak response efforts.
•    Pandemics pose some of the biggest threats in the world to people’s lives and to economies, and for the first time we will have a system that can move funding and teams of experts to the sites of outbreaks before they spin out of control
•    Jim Yong Kim is the President of the World Bank Group.
•    This facility addresses a long, collective failure in dealing with pandemics. 
•    The PEF facility launch announcement came few days ahead of the May 26-27 Summit of Group of Seven Leaders in Ise-Shima, Japan. 
•    G7 leaders had urged the World Bank Group to develop the initiative during their May 2015 summit in Schloss-Elmau, Germany.
•    Japan became the first donor to the PEF initiative and committed $ 50 million.
•    Innovative financing for crisis responses by PEF, together with financing for preparedness and prevention in peacetime, including through IDA, are important to mitigate human and social losses and to help quickly recover in the event of a crisis.