Helen Keller

The food and nutritional crisis in the Sahel in 2004-2005 highlighted the weaknesses of policies and programs in addressing the chronically elevated prevalence of acute malnutrition, weaknesses in national capacity to scale-up treatment of malnutrition in response to emergency situations and poor integration of programs to treat malnutrition with programs to prevent malnutrition. One of the key challenges in addressing undernutrition in these countries is aligning emergency response and development approaches. In the past 3 years HKI has received funding from the United States Agency for International Development, the Goldman Fund, Monsanto Fund, the European Union and CAFOD to implement a CMAM initiative to address these weaknesses in 3 of the most vulnerable Sahelian countries where HKI has country offices: Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The integration of the treatment of acute malnutrition into a larger preventive framework has become the model for HKI and distinguishes our approach from that of other organizations. Support for CMAM and the promotion of essential nutrition actions (ENA), a proven set of preventative nutrition actions, are both important; and both programs require significant investments to be linked for synergy and brought to scale. Another distinguishing feature of HKI’s approach is to build local public sector capacity to manage, plan, deliver and monitor CMAM services through existing health care structures. Thus HKI’s approach is to make these programs a permanent feature of government and community structures rather than delivering them directly through a parallel system. See the position paper on HKI’s approach to CMAM, including the link to preventative actions, for further information

http://www.hki.org/reducing-malnutrition/managing-acute-malnutrition.