Thanks to your ongoing support, Action Against Hunger is the lead organization providing SMART nutrition assessment methodology training for governments, United Nations agencies and humanitarian and development organizations around the world. SMART stands for Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Transitions. The SMART project is an inter-agency initiative launched in 2002 by a network of organizations and humanitarian practitioners.
Your commitment to our work means program teams can transfer knowledge to partners around the world so they can collect and analyze reliable nutrition and mortality data. This data informs our humanitarian programming and ultimately the decisions that affect millions of women, men, boys and girls worldwide. With your help, since 2009, Action Against Hunger has trained more than 1,300 health professionals on the SMART methodology.
In 2017, a partner organization, Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), asked Action Against Hunger to help build their SMART capacity. Their objective was to have and apply a standard methodology everywhere they worked around the world to enable the comparison of nutrition results. They reached out to our program team for technical support and training and then staff from 16 of ADRA International’s offices met to learn about SMART and how to use it from the Canadian SMART team, led by Victoria Sauveplane (Senior Nutrition Manager) and Paula Tenaglia (Director of Operations).
“This training was an eye-opener,” said Martin, a participant from ADRA Rwanda, noting that it took away his anxiety linked to surveys. “Before, I considered a survey to be a huge animal but now I realize that irrespective of having a public health background, it is possible to play a significant role in the planning and management of a survey using the skills and knowledge acquired from this training.”
ADRA International is now planning to integrate SMART into its nutrition and monitoring and evaluation practices in 2017, including in areas of Madagascar affected by drought.
Working in collaboration with organizations like ADRA International, Action Against Hunger plays an important role in improving the technical capacity of development professionals to collect high quality nutrition data worldwide. None of this work would be possible without your support – thank you.