More than a decade ago, International Medical Corps partnered with Save the Children and Action Against Hunger to create a team that provides program support for nutrition in emergencies (NiE) to help governments and organizations strengthen their responses. A few years later, this technical support team found a permanent home in the Global Nutrition Cluster (GNC), led by UNICEF—and expanded its pool of partners to include other members of the GNC, increasing the capacity to provide tailored guidance and advice, coordination assistance, training, quick remote support, a roster of technical consultants and extensive in-depth remote or in-country support.
International Medical Corps plays a vital role in the GNC’s operations team—which is responsible for delivering direct programming support to country nutrition clusters, sectors and partners—and co-leads, with UNICEF, the Global Thematic Working Group on Wasting. Though most of our Nutrition technical-unit team members dedicate some of their time to the GNC CT and global-level working groups, International Medical Corps also employs Martha Nakakande as a full-time advisor for the GNC. Martha also supports the nutrition programs at International Medical Corps’ Central African Republic, Chad and Mali missions.
Martha focuses primarily on infant and young-child feeding and the management of wasting, providing NiE support to partners and clusters. She has supported multiple countries, including Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Zambia. She also provides support at the global level through the various working groups and platforms linked to wasting programming, co-chairs the cluster’s Anti-Racism and Localization Working Group and Adult Malnutrition Working Group, co-chairs the Core Group’s Nutrition Working Group and is a member of various other working groups in the GNC.
Martha has also supported the development of the GNC’s Moderate Wasting Initiative (MWI), piloting activities in Nepal and remotely supporting activities in Madagascar. The MWI’s role is to help country-level actors come up with effective context-specific solutions to bring the management of moderate wasting to scale. In Nepal, Martha supported an MWI pilot that implemented the Rapid Nutrition Determinants Assessment to understand the key determining factors of malnutrition and how they interact with one another, to figure out which factors the community perceived to most likely be causing wasting. Using the findings, team members then looked at these factors in the context of specific and sensitive nutrition programs that already existed to identify resources and interventions that could be used to prevent and manage wasting.
“The support we provide is really diverse,” Martha says. “We’re doing everything from providing capacity strengthening for programs, to developing or reviewing guidance, to supporting localization efforts in the humanitarian space.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Martha worked on simplified approaches for treating wasting, and continued to support countries in this crucial area—helping nutrition clusters in countries such as Myanmar, Nigeria and Somalia develop strategies and guidance for continuing nutrition programs when there are supply disruptions or shortages. She is currently working with the West and Central African region offices of UNICEF to review and adapt the guidance on nutrition programming in the absence of supplies.
Capacity Strengthening in Somalia
The Somalia Nutrition Cluster coordinator and the country’s Ministry of Health conducted a capacity assessment determining that the country’s stabilization centers—inpatient facilities where children with severe acute malnutrition can receive treatment—needed capacity strengthening to improve their management of severe malnutrition. In line with the GNC’s localization agenda—which International Medical Corps supports—Martha and our Somalia mission supported nearly 50 local organizations with two cohorts of capacity strengthening training in 2022 and 2023. These local actors participated in seven days of classroom training and practical sessions at the International Medical Corps stabilization center in the Galkayo Hospital. Our Somalia nutrition team then followed up with the trained participants and visited their stabilization centers to provide on-the-job support.
Some of the reported improvements after this post-training support included:
- better general organization of the stabilization facilities;
- better medical and therapeutic care, thanks to a better understanding of treatment protocols;
- improvements in measurements, such as mid-upper arm circumference, that track children’s nutrition status; and
- improvements in how stabilization center staff compile and file information.
“It’s quite an intriguing support that we did, and I really wish it could be done for so many other local, national actors because localization is so important for sustainability,” Martha says.
That’s why the GNC continues to work toward greater localization, and why International Medical Corps will continue our vital role with the GNC, working with local partners around the world so that they can expand their own reach and more effectively help their communities.