Staff at the Elikya Ebola Treatment Centre in Ituri walked out over unpaid wages on Saturday 25 July1. Elikya is a different facility from Rwampara, where workers abandoned an isolation ward on 13 July after a province-wide stoppage over unclaimed hazard pay four days before that. Readers who remember last week's dispute are not reading about it again: two treatment centres have now lost their staff to the same cause, twelve days apart.
Rwampara alone could be settled locally, as a grievance against one payroll office. A second walkout at a second site, over the same unpaid wages, describes a financing pipeline that is not reaching the people who put on the suits. The Pandemic Fund activated up to $220.6m in emergency grant financing for this response on 5 June, part of an aggregate funding figure that passed $990m the following week. Money committed in Washington and Geneva has to travel through a national treasury, a provincial health division and a payroll list before it becomes a nurse's wage in Bunia, and each of those steps has stalled somewhere.
An Ebola treatment centre without staff does not degrade gracefully. Doffing an isolation suit safely takes two trained people, decontamination runs on a schedule, and a ward that loses its nurses stops admitting rather than admitting badly. Every hour Elikya's staff were away is capacity subtracted from a province already turning patients toward wards they cannot easily reach. Donors can announce further tranches; the constraint sits between the announcement and the payslip.
