• Facebook
• Twitter

Admin area Edit this page Log out

Sudan, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Yemen: Lessons from complementary feeding programming in emergencies

View this article as a pdf

Gwénola Desplats is a Senior Nutritionist with ENN.

Jodine Chase is the Infant Feeding in Emergency Core Group Facilitator at ENN. 

Background

The complementary feeding period (6-23 months) is a critical window in a child’s life when ensuring an appropriate diet is important to prevent malnutrition. It is therefore vital to prioritise supporting families with children aged 6-23 months to ensure access to appropriate complementary foods, promote positive feeding practices including continued breastfeeding, and to facilitate optimal growth and development. This is particularly so in emergencies when optimum infant and young child feeding may be jeopardised.

The Infant Feeding in Emergencies Core Group (IFE-CG) provides recommendations for complementary feeding in emergencies (CFE) interventions. In a review of CFE conducted in 2019, the IFE-CG identified that there was a gap in the ‘how-to’ of supporting the diets of young children in emergencies (IFE-CG, 2020). In early 2020, UNICEF launched ‘Programming Guidance for Improving Young Children’s Diets During the Complementary Feeding Period’ (UNICEF, 2020)  which provides an Action Framework to improve the diets of children aged 6-23 months. This series of case studies examines the interventions and actions implemented in four fragile contexts¹ – Sudan, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Yemen – using the Action Framework as a tool.

Methods

The case studies were undertaken in contexts where some progress towards improving CFE programming had been reported and where a diverse set of key actions and interventions to improve young children’s diets had been documented. We hoped that the learnings from these four countries would provide greater insights for both country-level practitioners and global-level decision-makers on the ‘how to’ of CFE programming and contribute to improving this. 

We used a case study methodology to collect information from multiple sources including a country-level document review, an online survey questionnaire, and key informant interviews. We classified data by themes following the logic of the Action Framework. We then reported on the various components of CFE programming that emerged from this analysis.

The findings from each country were presented according to the structure and themes of the UNICEF Programming Guidance (Box 1).      

Outcomes

The Action Framework was a useful tool for this exercise as it provided structure to the different components and stages of CFE programming and identified potential opportunities at different levels, through various channels. It may therefore be useful for other countries to use this framework to plan, design and implement CFE interventions. The examination of different settings including contexts where complementary feeding is not prioritised and therefore not yet established is recommended.

For more information, please contact Jodine Chase at ife@ennonline.net

Case Study 1

Reference this page

Gwénola Desplats (). Sudan, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Yemen: Lessons from complementary feeding programming in emergencies. Field Exchange 68 , November 2022. p41. www.ennonline.net/fex/68/cfeprogrammingcasestudies

(ENN_7510)