On May 15, 2026, WHO declared the epidemic of Ebola disease caused by the Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), with 246 suspected cases and 80 suspected deaths reported at the time of the declaration. The Public Health Emergency Operations Center (COUSP) in Kinshasa was immediately activated in response mode, deploying rapid response teams to identify and investigate all suspected cases. Bluesquare immediately joined the effort as a technical support partner, providing the data infrastructure and analytical tools that will help the Ministry of Health and its partners to coordinate the response.
What makes the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak particularly challenging is the absence of any approved vaccine or treatment for this specific Ebola strain. Unlike the better-known Zaire ebolavirus, the Bundibugyo strain cannot be addressed through existing vaccination strategies, and no therapeutic protocol has been validated for it. Combined with no population immunity and constrained diagnostic capacity at the onset of the epidemic, the outbreak demands a tightly controlled, case-based surveillance approach.
The primary objective of the COUSP is to investigate every suspected case, confirm those that test positive, map their contacts, and interrupt transmission. To do this at scale and across multiple health zones and provinces, epidemiologists need accurate, timely, and consolidated data.
When the COUSP was activated, Bluesquare was mobilized as a technical support partner alongside key actors including the INSP (Institut National de Santé Publique), WHO, HISP WCA, and RTI. Its role is to provide the Ministry of Health of the DRC with the data infrastructure, integration capacity, and analytical tools needed to enable data-supported decision-making — while the COUSP and its epidemiologists remain in full operational control of the response.
This work is building on a long term support Bluesquare has been providing to the DRC surveillance for some time. With funding from the Gates Foundation, Bluesquare has developed a data integration capacity at the DRC MOH, to facilitate the consolidation of diverse data flows, and ensure various departments and health systems actors can share data with each other in a safe and transparent manner. Already in 2025, the COUSP and Bluesquare used this infrastructure to build surveillance and response dashboards specific to the Mpox epidemic for the COUSP. The institutional relationships, technical infrastructure, and working knowledge built during that engagement were directly applied when the Bundibugyo outbreak emerged.
Learn more by viewing the interview of Gilbert Ngonga, Bluesquare’s Country Lead in the DRC:
Following the Mpox epidemic, the INSP adopted OpenHEXA (Bluesquare’s open-source data integration and intelligence platform) as the backbone of its data operations for its response activities in conjunction with a DHIS2 tracker supported by colleagues at RTI and HISP. Dedicated workspaces were set up for three main entities involved in epidemic management within the Ministry of Health : the COUSP, the DSE (Direction de Surveillance Épidémiologique), and the INRB (Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale) — the national laboratory in charge of testing for and sequencing the Bundibugyo strain.
Each workspace gives these institutions a secured, structured environment where data can be ingested, processed, and shared with authorized users across the Ministry of Health and humanitarian partners.
A secured connection between the COUSP’s OpenHEXA workspace and the DHIS2 Tracker program configured for the Ebola epidemic enables the automated extraction, transformation, and validation of the epidemiological line list — the structured record of all suspected and confirmed cases, contacts, and their follow-up status.
With this pipeline in place, the COUSP no longer depends on manual data consolidation. The line list is always up to date and audit-ready, which is critical: consolidation of line lists enables follow-up at scale and allows the COUSP to share data securely with partners within the Ministry of Health and with humanitarian organizations operating on the ground.
Within OpenHEXA, automated analysis aggregates the data daily by health zone and key demographic characteristics including age and gender. The COUSP receives a structured daily picture covering the main indicators needed to track the epidemic: number of suspected and confirmed cases, deaths among confirmed cases, laboratory results, and patient care information.
To support the COUSP and other public health actors, two data products were built on top of this epidemiological data infrastructure.
The COUSP now can rely on a continuously updated real-time surveillance and response dashboard that provides a live view of the epidemic across multiple dimensions: the flow of patients, the movement of laboratory samples, and the evolution of confirmed cases across health zones. Rather than a static report, it is a decision-support tool designed for daily operational use.
Epidemiologists can use it to answer specific, actionable questions, such as:
These are not questions that can be answered by looking at raw line lists. The dashboard surfaces patterns and anomalies that raw line lists cannot show.
A daily Situation Report (Sitrep) is automatically generated from OpenHEXA and distributed to the COUSP each day. Epidemiologists and analysts no longer spend time manually compiling data: the automation handles it, freeing the team to focus on interpreting results and informing decisions rather than assembling figures.
During outbreak response, epidemiologists both need a daily overview of the situation, and the ability to identify specific characteristics, risk factors, population segments, or geographic areas where the disease is spreading.
With the Sitrep and the dashboard, the COUSP has a shared operational picture that is reliable, reproducible, and secure. The Sitrep delivers the daily snapshot. The dashboard provides the analytical depth. Together, they give the COUSP what it needs to move from data to decision.
Data analytics for public health governance requires more than technical integration: it requires building the right data products for the right decision-makers at the right moment. The role of a technical partner is to make that possible and reliable, so that public health institutions can focus on what matters: protecting populations.
For more on the platform powering this response, see OpenHEXA and Bluesquare’s DHIS2 hosting and support services.
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