After a government watchdog discovered that location data for hundreds of US-funded clinics in Afghanistan were significantly flawed, the agency in charge of overseeing that initiative followed up with new coordinates, which also proved to play host to no healthcare facilities.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said that the US Agency for International Development provided faulty information for the second time in months, noting that over 100 of the updated locations it listed didn’t have “any new coordinates.”
SIGAR John Sopko also remarked in an Aug. 18 letter published Monday that 60 facilities still had no “geospatial data in either list.”
The oversight organ had conducted a probe of over 600 US-backed health clinics in Afghanistan—the results of which were published in June. That investigation found that USAID did not know the accurate locations of four of five of those facilities.
In his August letter, Sopko also stated that the “new locations were an average of 55 kilometers away from the original coordinates, with some locations hundreds of kilometers away.”
Sopko also took exception to comments made last month by USAID downplaying the significance of SIGAR’s June findings.
In a letter to the watchdog, a USAID official, Donald Sampler had claimed that the data was “not the best and certainly not the only tool to monitor” clinics. He went on to say that the “lack of precise geospatial data” does not interfere with the agency’s ability to keep maintain on clinics—a project that has cost US taxpayers $259 million since 2008.
Sopko responded by saying that he was “puzzled” by the statements, and that having access to “accurate and reliable data” is a “critical tool in providing effective oversight and mitigating corruption.”
“Without it,” Sopko claimed, “oversight personnel—including third-party monitors and foreign service nationals—may be left to roam unsafe streets, carrying sensitive equipment and documentation, searching for a clinic that may, or may not, exist in a given district or village.”
SIGAR initially decided in June to press USAID on health clinic location data after the watchdog discovered that the reported coordinates of 80 percent of Afghan clinics were “questionable,” with some GPS readings pointing to the middle of a desert or to sites that were in different countries.
