The US has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild Afghanistan’s education sector, but a federal overseer is now raising concerns that a lot of that money was wasted on schools, teachers, and students that did not exist.
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is demanding answers from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) over reports that the Afghan government falsified education data in order to collect more funding from the development agency.
“Does USAID have an estimate of how much US money may have been spent on ghost schools, ghost teachers, and ghost administrators?” asked SIGAR’s John Sopko in a letter this week to the acting administrator of USAID, Alfonso Lenhardt.
Sopko’s letter referenced a report from Afghanistan’s 24/7 news channel, TOLO News, that former ministry officials lied to the Afghan government and international donors about school enrollment numbers, hoping to bilk appropriators and aid organizations out of more funding.
“The Ministers reported that there are no active schools in insecure parts of the country, and that former officials doctored statistics, embezzled money, and interfered with university entrance exams,” Sopko noted.
“These allegations suggest that US and other donors may have paid for schools that students do not attend and for the salaries of teachers who do not teach,” he added, asking the development agency what actions it has taken to investigate the reports of falsified data.
“SIGAR believes the allegations about ghost schools, ghost students, and ghost teachers call for immediate attention,” Sopko said.
Since the fall of the Taliban, the US has spent approximately $769 million on education programs in Afghanistan, according to SIGAR. USAID claims that money has been well spent, citing school enrollment data showing more than 8 million students were going to Afghan school in 2013—up from a student body of only 900,000 in 2002.
Sopko noted, however, that those numbers came from the now-discredited Afghan Ministry of Education, and that USAID “cannot verify” the data on its own.
The letter gives the development agency until June 30 to respond to the inquiry.
