Providing Technical Assistance for SUN countries

The Technical Assistance for Nutrition (TAN) programme, funded with aid from the UK government, is a mechanism to provide technical assistance to Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) country governments and build capacities towards advancing multi-sector nutrition agendas, in line with the SUN Movement principles and roadmap. TAN also strives to generate, learn from, adopt and disseminate knowledge of what works within and across countries in the SUN Movement. TAN partners are the SUN Movement Secretariat (SMS), Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition Plus (MQSUN+), Nutrition International (NI), and Emergency Nutrition Network (ENN). MQSUN+ and NI provide technical assistance (TA) to SUN countries, while ENN provides knowledge management (KM) support to countries, the TAN programme and the SMS more broadly. MQSUN+ and NI also support the SMS as needed. The TAN programme began in 2015 and, over a four-year period, NI and MQSUN+ have developed and implemented over 85 TA projects to support SUN countries.

SUN Movement countries can access TA delivered by MQSUN+ and NI. MQSUN+ is a last-resort TA provider and receives requests from the SUN Focal Points through the SMS. NI provides an in-country solution, receiving requests from the SUN Focal Point and multi-stakeholder platform. This facilitates a ‘demand-driven’ model whereby technical support and expertise reach countries in a timely, context-specific and relevant manner. NI and MQSUN+ support national SUN Focal Points and global SUN stakeholders to overcome capacity gaps in the design and delivery of multi-sector national nutrition plans, tapping into their global hub to source and deploy expertise when required.

This technical brief, the third in a series of three, has been developed to document different aspects, best practices and lessons learnt from TA provision. The other briefs in the series consider TA ways of working within the TAN project and a landscape analysis of TA provision within the project.