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Ethiopia

Ethiopia Health Cluster Preparedness and Response Plan 2024-2025.

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Introduction

Ethiopia has been repeatedly affected by conflict, flooding, drought, and multiple disease outbreaks in the past years. The country is actively responding to the longest recorded cholera outbreak which started in August 2022, recurrent measles outbreaks which started in August 2021, and the highest number of malaria cases reported since 2017. The El Niño and La Niña phenomena are causing further havoc, resulting in drought in some parts of the country, and flooding in others. Food insecurity due to lost harvest and livestock is aggravating already high malnutrition rates, negatively impacting morbidity and mortality. Either because of damage to health facilities or displacement to areas without functional health facilities, affected populations are at risk of increased morbidity and mortality due to lack of access to basic health services, including sexual and reproductive health and Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) services. In a context with high maternal and neonatal mortality rates, low share of births attended by skilled health workers and low coverage of essential health services, the health status of affected populations may quickly deteriorate, unless rapid corrective action is taken.

In 2023, the health cluster reached a population of 4.5M people in need of health services including 1.4M IDPs, 195,000 returning IDPs, and 2.9M host population. This figure does not include refugees, while the health cluster supported with emergency medical supplies and disease outbreak response in refugee camps. It is not traceable how many refugees were reached with this support.

A rough calculation estimates that for health cluster preparedness and response interventions (including for refugees), over 83M USD were spent during 2023. This does not include overhead costs of health partners operational in the affected areas.
For 2024, the health cluster is hoping to reach 6.7M people as identified in the 2024 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), plus a proportion of the 1.1M projected refugee population in the 2024 UNHCR Ethiopia Country Refugee Response Plan.
For 2025, this figure is expected to remain largely the same, or ideally decrease.

The Health Cluster Preparedness and Response Plan 2024-2025 is not budgeted, but the estimated annual cost is an indication of the minimum costs per year for life-saving health cluster preparedness and response interventions, excluding overhead.