Nutrition surveillance in a situation of recurrent natural disasters

摘要

The Ethiopian experience demonstrates that nutrition surveillance can serve a useful purpose both in predicting food shortages and in planning and executing relief interventions. The usefulness of the in formation for directing relief operations, as in the case of targeting areas, screening beneficiaries, and assessing impacts of interventions, is better established than is the case for its reliability in predicting food shortages. The argument against the latter is not so much on technical grounds as on its cost implication. It is true that nutrition surveillance, particularly at monthly and bimonthly intervals, is costly. However, the cost is often viewed only in terms of the amount of money required to conduct a survey, without taking into account what the surveillance may save through better targeting of areas and beneficiaries and, most important, the human lives it saves through timely interventions. It is true that nutrition information cannot provide as much lead time as such indicators ascrop forecasts. Nevertheless, it can refine the forecasts that the early indicators provide, and a reasonable lead time is still possible. The fact that, for early warning purposes, it needs to be conducted only in areas where other indicators have predicted food shortages also allows the coverage of the survey to be reduced, and with this its cost. As regards its usefulness for directing emergency operations, there seems to be no better alternative. In Ethiopia, decisions on whether or not to start relief operations have frequently been influenced by the results of nutrition surveillance. On several occasions requests for relief food have been rejected or accepted on the basis of evidence such data provided. In disaster management, it is the decisioncycle that should reflect the data cycle and not vice versa. In general it can be argued that, when food and similar inputs are required, an effective emergency operation is inconceivable without information generated through nutrition surveillance. It is required both at the planning and execution stages. The only major concern in making effective use of such an approach is its cost implication. The challenge is to design it in such a way that an acceptable frequency of data collection can be established at a justifiable cost.