The World Bank Group has announced an additional $100 million in funding for Ebola crisis response efforts, with a focus on accelerating the deployment of foreign health workers to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, the three West African countries at the center of the current outbreak.

In recent weeks, West African and global development leaders have appealed for a massive coordinated reinforcement of international health teams to the three countries to help contain the epidemic. Among other things, the additional health workers are needed to treat and care for patients, boost the capacity of local health responders, manage new Ebola treatment centers that are coming on line, and provide essential health services for non-Ebola patients. Current estimates from the United Nations indicate that about five thousand medical, training, and support personnel are needed in the three countries over the coming months in order to contain the outbreak, including between seven hundred and a thousand health workers to staff up Ebola treatment centers.

The additional financing from the World Bank, which boosts its total commitment to address Ebola to date to more than $500 million, will be used to set up a coordination hub in cooperation with the ministries of health in the three countries, the World Health Organization, its own primary Ebola coordination entity, and other agencies. In turn, the hub, with technical support from WHO and in close collaboration with other partners, will coordinate with the Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Ebola and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) to resolve key issues blocking the recruitment of more foreign health workers, including pay and benefits, training, safety, transportation, housing, provision of urgent medical care, and/or medical evacuations for infected staff.

"The world's response to the Ebola crisis has increased significantly in recent weeks, but we still have a huge gap in getting enough trained health workers to the areas with the highest infection rates," said World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim. "We must urgently find ways to break any barriers to the deployment of more health workers. It is our hope that this $100 million can help be a catalyst for a rapid surge of health workers to the communities in dire need."