Attachments
BACKGROUND
Action Against Hunger Canada as the global convenor of SMART continues to offer trainings across regions in order to strengthen the capacity of institutions and organizations involved in nutrition surveys and provision of relevant technical support.
The SMART (Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Transitions) methodology is still a preferred standard method among partners conducting nutrition and mortality surveys, thus the inevitable demand. It is for this reason that SMART Team continues to conduct national and regional trainings to provide key-partner staff with the latest knowledge updates and understanding of the methodology.
Since the launching of Nigeria’s National Strategic Plan of Action for Nutrition (NSPAN) 2014-2019, the need to strengthen the Nutrition Information System (NIS) in the country, including conducting surveys on a more regular basis was highlighted.
Although the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and National Population Commission (NPopC) conduct national demographic and health surveys every 4 to 5 years, their frequency does not help to monitor progress on an annual basis. Nonetheless, since the 2010 Sahel Crisis, the country has been demonstrating the potential to establish a data collection system that captures change over time through the implementation of Nutrition and Health Surveys using SMART methods on an annual basis. The system focuses on reducing the cost of data collection, improving data quality, and ensuring timeliness of survey results for improved decision-making.
Although the Nutrition Sector Information Management Technical Working Group (NSIMTWG) aims to ensure timeliness and quality of data, the strategic selection of key indicators and their institutionalization still require more investment to ensure longer-term sustainability. In fact, the limited number of qualified SMART managers especially among government staff remains a bottleneck in coordinating and implementing SMART surveys, as well as in the ownership of survey results and their utilization for decision-making. For this reason, technical committees and national/ state information technical working groups which are responsible for ensuring proper survey coordination efforts and compliance with SMART recommendations remain inefficacious mainly in the coordination between government agencies and various technical and financial partners on survey planning, implementation, result validation and dissemination. These limitations need to be addressed to ensure valuable contribution of TWG in integrated phase classification (IPC) analysis, caseload estimation for acute malnutrition, the establishment of nutrition information systems for trend analyses, resource mobilization, advocacy, and early warning system (EWS).
Therefore, strengthening NSIMTWG at national and state levels by building the capacity of stakeholders is crucial to improve the coordination and implementation of SMART survey and ensure quality data collection, analysis and use of results.