An Operational Peer Review (OPR) mission took place in January 2020. The OPR team was led by the Peer-2-Peer Director and Team leader and included five senior representatives from UN agencies and NGO representatives (ICVA, InterAction, IOM, UNICEF and WHO).
The tenth epidemic of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri was declared by the Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 1 August 2018. It is the second most deadly Ebola outbreak since the 2014 West Africa epidemic. Unlike the previous outbreak that took place in the DRC Equateur region in 2018, this one occurred in a much larger geographic region that has historically been experiencing intense insecurity and suffers from an acute humanitarian crisis. The population in the region lacks access to basic services and is hosting over one million IDPs and a caseload of refugees from neighboring countries.
On 17 July 2019, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the Ebola outbreak in DRC a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) and on 30 May the IASC activated its “Humanitarian System-Wide Scale-Up Activation Protocol for the Control of Infectious Disease Events” for an initial period of three months. The Protocol was subsequently extended twice for a period of three-months each time (until 20 November and a final extension which ended on 20 February). As part of a mandatory requirement of the IASC Activation Protocol.