Community Management of Acute Malnutrition Resources Signposting Document

Background

The GNC Technical Alliance is a technical assistance platform that responds to technical requests by leveraging and building on existing nutrition resources, capacities, initiatives, and coordination structures. A regular technical request posed to the Alliance in relation to wasting has centered on which community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) related resources including training tools, are available. While a plethora of resources and tools exist on CMAM, including a wide range of agency-specific tools, with severalplatforms to share such resources, there remains a need for a consolidated listand repository of resources and tools that country-level practitioners can easily access and use when developing country-specific tools and resources. The need for a broader CMAM-related resource repository website is currently being discussed by global actors. Given these discussions, this signposting document aims to serve as an initial step to developing such a repository and highlight some of the key CMAM related resources and tools. 

While important to capture all country-level and global-level resources to assist practitioners in identifying and using relevant materials, given the scope of work and capacity, such a broad repository was not possible. The scope was thus narrowed through the following inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Inclusion Criteria:

• CMAM-related materials include policy guidance documents, tools, training, and orientation documents that support the implementation of CMAM-related programming.
• Global-level tools, although if no global tool existed on a particular topic, country examples were sought.
• Resources in English- although the priority of the Alliance is to provide resources in as many languages as possible, this signposting document was limited to English resources at this stage.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Documents from specific countries or regions with little broader reference - Country specific CMAM guidelines
• Resources that relate to the other Global Thematic Working Groups such as resources related to infant feeding in emergencies, nutrition information systems, etc. 
• Nutrition assessment-related resources aside from those that relate to coverage and monitoring.
• Research articles and reviews that relate to CMAM.
• The search for relevant CMAM resources was finalized on the 28th of February 2023 and thus, resources published after this date were not included.
• To ensure the relevance of resources, newer resources were highlighted in this review- resources older than 2008 were not typically included unless deemed relevant and thus included in the column entitled ‘Underpinning guidance, outdated and other resources. These documents aim to provide contextual understanding as well as offer practitioners additional resources on a specific area should they wish to explore a topic further.