IFE Core Group meeting report 2019

The IFE Core Group Annual Meeting was held in Oxford from 28 - 30 October 2019, hosted by Emergency Nutrition Network (ENN) and funded by the Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and Irish Aid. Days 1 and 2 were full member meetings. Day 3 was attended by Steering Committee (SC) members only.

The meeting objectives were to:
1. Review the way of working for the IFE Core Group (IFE-CG), including demands and needs for the group.
2. Locate the work of the IFE-CG with the wider existing initiatives/collaborators (e.g., Global Technical Assistance Mechanism for Nutrition (GTAM), Nutrition Technical Rapid Response Team (Tech RRT), the Global Breastfeeding Collective, Global Nutrition Cluster (GNC) and strategic engagements (e.g., World Health Assembly (WHA).
3. Review IFE-CG progress against the workplan and identify priority areas and actions or a feasible workplan to be delivered by the collective for 2020.

The expected outputs of the meeting were:

• Key areas to address in updated IFE-CG terms of reference (TORs), including strategies to optimise ways of working.
• Clarity on the working modality for engagement with different initiatives; specifically the GTAM.
• Updated workplan with key identified priority areas, roles and responsibilities.
• Meeting report with clear priority actions.

A total of 22 participants attended the first two full days of the face-to-face meeting, with an additional seven participants joining remotely at various times and five attending part of the meeting. Topics covered over the two days included a review of internal ways of working, a review of the workplan objectives and activities, and a discussion on collaborations and linkages with external entities (particularly the GTAM). Space for technical discussions was dedicated to an in-depth look at complementary feeding (CF) (ongoing OFDA-funded review of CF in emergencies by Emergency Nutrition Network (ENN) and a new global informed action framework for CF being developed by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and presentations on various innovations in Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies (IFE).

Five IFE-CG Steering Committee (IFE-CG SC) members attended Day 3. Key discussions from the previous two days were examined to reflect on and further refine key decisions and suggested action points. Issues covered included member engagement, engaging other sectors, communications, the group's TOR and Declaration of Interest requirements, the group's sustainability, monthly meetings and upcoming work on the Theory of Change. Summaries of Day 3 discussions have been included throughout this report.

See Annex A for a full list of participants. The agenda is shown in Annex B. Presentations are available on request from ENN. This report provides an overview of the meeting's proceedings, including suggested areas for action for further review (Annex C).