What we know now: A decade of community based treatment of SAM: Conference report (2013)

This is the report of a conference held in London in October 2013, facilitated by the Coverage Monitoring Network (CMN), to review of emerging lessons on community-based treatment of severe acute malnutrition (SAM). The conference brought together over 170 academics, practitioners and policy makers from a range of NGOs, UN agencies, academic institutions and national governments. What began as a simple ‘lessons learned’ exercise rapidly grew into a broad review of the state of SAM treatment today, and the start of a process to identify key areas for future action. At the end of the two-day conference, a series of priority areas were identified, divided in seven different streams (Institutional Architecture, Financing, Government, Supply Chain, Treatment, Nutrition Information and Community, Access & Demand), and in the weeks following the conference, partners continued to refine these areas of future work and begun making specific commitments to contribute to their development and implementation. The conference was thus the beginning of a process to strengthen SAM treatment through prioritisation and coordination of efforts by the international humanitarian community.