Major Western donors have pressed the World Health Organization to launch a deeper external probe demanding how a major sexual abuse scandal in the Democratic Republic of Congo involving its staff was allowed to happen, diplomats told Reuters.
Some 83 aid workers, a quarter of them employed by the WHO, were involved in sexual exploitation and abuse during the country's Ebola epidemic from 2018 to 2020, an independent commission said last month.
Women accused local and foreign aid workers of demanding sex in exchange for jobs and there were nine alleged rapes, the panel said in a report on the large-scale abuse in North Kivu and Ituri provinces.