Transforming decision making on emergency feeding programmes

WHAT IS THE HUMANITARIAN NEED?

• Poor quality and inconsistent SFP reporting, leading to difficulties in assessing the efficacy and effectiveness of programmes and biased decision making across the humanitarian community
• Concerns over the quality of the interventions and limited impacts for children
• Poor NGO accountability to beneficiaries of SFPs

WHAT IS THE INNOVATIVE SOLUTION?

The CMAM report is a standardised guideline and Access™ based software, supported by an E-learning module, to train NGOs and local and national governments who wish to use it. This innovation is the first and only nutrition programme monitoring system to integrate background programme and population information with data on the child beneficiaries of feeding programmes.

The CMAM report increases both the quality and consistency of SFP reporting and allows better understanding of a nutrition programme’s performance, flagging problems and highlighting interventions that are achieving their objectives in different geographical locations. This novel tool will allow NGOs, donors, local and national governments to compare performance of programmes in different contexts as well as enabling NGO users to take any necessary remedial actions at a programme level and ensure that the feeding programmes being run have maximum impact.  Such comparisons would, in addition, greatly facilitate improved programme design and delivery, and ultimately lead to greater impacts for children.

WHAT ARE THE EXPECTED OUTCOMES?

The CMAM software platform will be changed from MS™ Access to a web-based platform and helpdesk will be maintained.  The CMAM training package (guidelines and training materials) will be revised and delivered to a wide range of SFP implementing partners.  The study will involve review of SFP field data collected during the year to compare different SFP contexts an approaches to identify how best to maximise performance.

The analysis will inform the humanitarian nutrition sector about whether SFPs work, under which conditions they work effectively and ineffectively, and where alternative interventions should be implemented for a cost effective humanitarian response that is accountable to the emergency affected community.