Scope and purpose
The Accelerating Nutrition Improvement in sub-Saharan Africa (ANI) Project was launched in March 2013 supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development of Canada (DFATD). ANI aims to support eleven sub-Saharan African countries (1) to strengthen nutrition surveillance systems, conduct surveys in four of those eleven countries (i.e. Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Zimbabwe) to establish a baseline for key indicators, and scale-up evidence-informed nutrition actions in three of the eleven countries (i.e. Ethiopia, Uganda and United Republic of Tanzania).
As part of the regional and global components of the ANI project, WHO committed to help three scaling-up countries to develop stakeholder and programme implementation mapping, in collaboration with REACH. Description of actual implementation modalities of nutrition interventions is important to identify effective (as well as ineffective) practices and thus help maximizing the impact of the actions being implemented. Availability of information on the implementing agencies/partners, the coverage, and possibly about the quality of the services provided is an important tool for planning and scaling-up effective actions in countries.
The meeting was a follow-up to the first brainstorming meeting held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 27-28 February 2014. At the first meeting, global level tools and country level adaptations were presented and common critical elements of a stakeholder mapping system were agreed. The country teams of the three scaling-up countries (i.e. Ethiopia, Uganda and United Republic of Tanzania) decided on next steps to take in their respective countries to include these elements in further developing, revising or updating their respective stakeholder mapping systems.
The aim of the meeting was to review country progress in implementing their agreed next steps and decide how each country would proceed in finalizing its stakeholder mapping system before the end of 2015. Country teams will discussed successes as well as challenges in stakeholder mapping and how to overcome such challenges. Discussions focused on experiences in the three countries, however it is also expected that these experiences will contribute to the on-going global and regional efforts in undertaking and harmonization of the mapping work.
(1) These include Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.