Audit of Programs in the Republic of Congo
26 August 2022
In the past 10 years, little progress has been made in fighting the three diseases in the Republic of Congo. This is a result of both limited national government support and the limited scope of Global Fund grants in previous funding cycles.
In view of these challenges, the Global Fund has strengthened its controls and oversight since 2018 by enforcing its Additional Safeguard policy and has doubled grant allocation (from €31 million to €57 million). Based on this audit, our main conclusions are:
- Optimal grant implementation conditions are not fully in place to curb the increasing burden of the three diseases, in particular HIV and TB. This translated into significant delays in implementing program activities and insufficient service deliveries across the health pyramid. The Secretariat has agreed to revisit the current approach to improve the ongoing implementation of grants and achieve more impact.
- Drugs are available at central level but due to various challenges across the supply chain, they are not available at health facilities for dispensing to patients. Similar to the first point, the Secretariat intends to address this issue by revisiting the current grant approach.
- The malaria grant implementer has shown overall adequate and effective internal control system to reduce the financial and fiduciary risks over managed grant even if few areas still need some improvement. The Secretariat will follow up the identified areas for improvement as part of their routine monitoring of activities.