Attachments
Introduction
Concern Worldwide (Concern) has been engaged in Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) at community, facility, district, national, and international level since CMAM’s inception and initial piloting in 2000. This article outlines five key lessons Concern has learned over the last 15 years of CMAM programming and concludes with priorities Concern has identified for supporting future equitable scale-up of quality services for acute malnutrition. A companion article summarizes Concern CMAM activities during the same time period.
Those involved in CMAM programming or with an interest in CMAM should find this article of interest 1.
The overarching goal of scaling up treatment programmes for acute malnutrition is to improve child survival and development. Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) is responsible for an estimated 7.8 percent of global underfive deaths each year. Moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) is responsible for a further 4 percent. i To put this information in context, other causes of death in children under-five years of age are pneumonia (18 percent), diarrhoea (11 percent), malaria (7 percent), meningitis (2 percent), AIDS (2 percent) and measles (1 percent). ii Since these estimates were derived from two different analyses, they may not be strictly comparable, but they do show that addressing SAM is essential to reducing global under-five mortality