WASHINGTON -- A government oversight agency reported on Wednesday that the U.S. Agency for International Development provided inaccurate or incomplete data on the locations of 80 percent of the health clinics it is funding in Afghanistan.
In a letter to USAID, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko noted discrepancies in the geospatial coordinates provided by the development agency last year for 420 of 641 health care facilities in the country. An additional 90 of those clinics had no accompanying geographic coordinates.
The data, provided to Sopko's organization in May 2014, is based on geospatial coordinates compiled by the Afghan Ministry of Public Health. While the data set was limited to health clinics in Afghanistan, coordinates for six of the clinics were located in Pakistan, six were in Tajikistan and one was in the Mediterranean Sea. The coordinates for 30 of the clinics pulled up locations in a different province in Afghanistan than the one USAID reported, and nearly 200 more coordinates yielded locations that were not in close proximity to a building.
"To provide meaningful oversight of these facilities, both USAID and [the Afghan Ministry of Public Health] need to know where they are," Sopko said in Wednesday's letter. He has given the development agency until the end of the month to send updated location information to confirm the existence of the 641 clinics, which have received more than $210 million in U.S. government funding.
USAID acknowledged the faulty data from 2014, but downplayed the importance of geographic coordinates for conducting oversight of the effectiveness of the clinics in Afghanistan.
"GPS coordinates are not the first line in monitoring a health facility. Local staff, third-party monitors, Afghan government officials, and the benefiting community do not use GPS to navigate, let alone to find a health facility, because they are familiar with the area or from the community benefiting from the project," said Larry Sampler, assistant administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs at USAID. "It has been a common practice for Afghan ministries to use the location of a village center as the coordinates for a facility, particularly when there was limited access to GPS technology."
The development agency said on Wednesday that it has an updated data set from the Afghan Ministry of Public Health, which corrected for reversals of longitude and latitude from last year's data. Although USAID cannot yet confirm the exact accuracy of each geographic coordinate, all coordinates in the new data set are located in Afghanistan.
The USAID program that funds the health clinics in Afghanistan was started in 2008 and spans 13 provinces throughout the country. According to Sampler, the program helps provide over 1 million Afghans with health care every month.
The watchdog agency's findings come as U.S. troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan -- a process President Barack Obama has said will be completed by the end of next year. The group has repeatedly warned that minimized oversight of government funded projects in Afghanistan is an inevitable consequence of the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops, which currently provide security for inspectors on the ground.
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