Designing Future Pandemic Financing : Lessons from World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the World Bank Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) while it lasted with the aim of providing lessons for future insurance-linked pandemic financing. The paper argues that with diseases capable of becoming a pandemic posing existential threat to the world the limitation of the funding for combating such viruses to only International Development Association (IDA) eligible countries was a flawed approach that put the world at risk by excluding non-IDA countries or countries not recognized as states under international law but still exist without the capacity to combat a pandemic. The paper further argues that the trigger mechanism for activating the insurance and cash windows of the PEF after several months of a disease being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) and reaching certain number of deaths threshold was equally a flawed approach that undermined the integrity of the PEF