OIG Oversight: Global Health

The USAID Office of Inspector General provides oversight of a wide variety of global health activities, including efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Ensuring the integrity of USAID’s procurement and management of global health supplies is a priority for our office. Our investigations have focused on criminal activity that compromises global health programming, including the theft, transport, and resale of commodities provided by the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, such as bed nets and antimalaria pharmaceuticals.

To combat fraud in this and other types of programming, we provide fraud awareness briefings and training worldwide to USAID personnel, as well as agency contractors and grantees executing the programming.  In response to credible allegations of misconduct, we coordinate with U.S. law enforcement and international oversight counterparts to identify and prosecute perpetrators.  Our work also informs agency-decisions on administrative responses—such as personnel actions, award terminations, and suspensions or debarments—to protect agency and government-wide interests.

Through our work, we also highlight opportunities for USAID to strengthen its response to future health emergencies. For example, developing a policy framework—with processes and procedures for assessing needs, overseeing awards, deploying staff, managing inventory, monitoring response, and capturing lessons learned—would better position USAID to quickly launch a coordinated response. Based on our recommendations, USAID began establishing a new policy and readiness unit to test procedures and ensure the synchronization of all Agency efforts during a humanitarian or global health emergency.

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