Resources

These reports were developed as part of a series of interrelated assessments regarding alternative proteins. The development of these reports was led by PATH in collaboration with Duke University, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and The Nature Conservancy through the Bridge Collaborative.

Technical assistance (TA) has long been used as a form of development assistance to support countries, however, its success, approach and purpose vary widely. In 2012, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development initiated a new programme approach to provide flexible TA for nutrition policy and programming, through the Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition project led by PATH. Through this mechanism, for the first time, Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) countries were able to request TA if they did not have the country capacity, technical expertise or existing internal TA mechanism to support their own nutrition planning efforts. Since 2012, MQSUN and now MQSUN+ have provided demand-driven TA to more than 50 SUN countries in response to both global and country requests. At the start of MQSUN, there was no template or framework for how to successfully deliver such technical assistance. Utilising robust monitoring and evaluation and knowledge management, MQSUN+ has continued to document key learnings and positive practices to inform an adaptive TA process. We have found that contextually-informed, inclusive and adaptive TA can energise progress by supporting countries to develop a country-specific and country-owned framework and roadmap for action. Such TA also boosts country efforts to overcome roadblocks and make progress toward reducing malnutrition. There has been growing interest in understanding how TA delivery models function and the elements that drive its implementation. Although there is no standard approach for providing TA, this brief highlights our applied knowledge to showcase how MQSUN/MQSUN+ TA delivery approaches have contributed to strengthening the nutrition enabling environment in SUN countries.

This poster uses results from the Zambia National Malaria Indicator Survey 2018 to describe both the coverage and usage of insecticide-treated bednets after a mass distribution campaign.

This poster describes the creation of a predictive model that allows high malaria risk health facility catchments in Senegal to be proactively targeted with interventions.

One method to achieve freeze prevention in vaccine carriers is to condition ice-packs that are normally frozen to temperatures as low as -20°C. Conditioning ice-packs involves partially thawing ice-packs in accordance with the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) procedure EVM-SOP-E7-04. According to the WHO procedure, an ice pack is considered properly conditioned after it has been left outside the freezer for long enough to stabilize at 0°C.In a preliminary study, it was found that conditioning time depends heavily on separation distance and percentage of shared border with other ice-packs. There was also evidence that conditioning time depends, though to a lesser degree, on the total size of a group of ice-packs conditioned together (including those not immediately adjacent). The data collected indicated that conditioning times for ice packs frozen at –25°C in 20°C to 23°C ambient temperatures can vary by up to 39 minutes, depending on ice-pack configuration. This finding has significance to operating procedures at cold chain points: if operators do not condition ice-packs using a consistent procedure, conditioning time could vary widely and could potentially risk exposing vaccines to freezing temperatures.