International agencies have been using malnutrition prevalences to confirm humanitarian emergencies for more than four decades, with early examples including the international response to the Nigerian civil war in Biafra in the 1960s and the famine across the Sahel in the 1970s. These early surveys were powerful tools for some of the first major media campaigns in the West publicising the severity and scale of a nutritional crisis, and were used to reinforce shocking images of hunger, starvation and death.

The prevalence of acute malnutrition is now one of the most widely used indicators of the severity of humanitarian crises throughout the world, and is endorsed by a wide array of UN organisations, donors, national governments and international agencies. Response options. This type of understanding is now expected of all humanitarian professionals, whether they are trained Nutritionists or not. The broad aim of the paper is therefore to help decisionmakers understand, use and interpret nutritional information and analysis, by reviewing in non-technical language how nutrition data is collected, analysed and interpreted.