Congo Keeps Struggling to Pay the People Fighting Its Ebola Outbreaks

(Bloomberg) -- Six Ebola checkpoints in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo stopped reporting last month because the people staffing them hadn’t been paid. Elsewhere, officials checking a list of 240 people supposedly working at an Ebola center could find only 40 of the workers. The discrepancy captures a problem that has dogged Congo’s public health system for decades and is now complicating its fight against the world’s fastest-growing Ebola epidemic. The government is trying to purge fictitious workers from payment lists using biometric registration and centralized payments, after officials found payrolls padded with people who may not actually be working. But verifying those lists is slowing payments to genuine responders, contributing to strikes and disrupting screening, treatment and infection-control work as the disease spreads. “The Ministry of Health doesn’t have an accurate image of who works where and does what,” said Stylianos Moshonas, a University of Antwerp researcher who has studied Congo’s public administration for years. Congo’s difficulties paying its healthcare workforce long predate the current outbreak. Yet among almost 256,000 health workers on personnel lists, fewer than 20% received a base salary, 41% received an occupational-risk allowance and 56% received neither. The workforce has expanded much faster than the government’s ability to pay it, Moshonas said. Formal registration matters even when government salaries are modest because it gives workers greater job security and entitlement to benefits including a pension, Moshonas said. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com Stay updated with the latest Trending , India , World and US news.