By engaging expert opinion, Marko Kerac and colleagues set research priorities for the management of acute malnutrition in infants.

Background: When food is available, the main obstacle to access is usually economic: people may not be able to afford a nutritious diet, even if they know what foods to eat. The Cost of the Diet method and software was developed to apply linear programming to better understand the extent to which poverty may affect people's ability to meet their nutritional specifications. This paper describes the principles of the method; the mathematics underlying the linear programming; the parameters and assumptions on which the calculations are based; and then illustrates the output of the software using examples taken from assessments.

The goals of the present targeted review on maternal and child overweight and obesity were to: (i) understand the current situation in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) with regard to recent trends and context-specific risk factors; and (ii) building off this, identify entry points for leveraging existing undernutrition programmes to address overweight and obesity in LMIC. Trends reveal that overweight and obesity are a growing problem among women and children in LMIC; as in Ghana, Kenya, Niger, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, where the prevalence among urban women is approaching 50 %. Four promising entry points were identified: (i) the integration of overweight and obesity into national nutrition plans; (ii) food systems (integration of food and beverage marketing regulations into existing polices on the marketing of breast-milk substitutes and adoption of policies to promote healthy diets); (iii) education systems (integration of nutrition into school curricula with provision of high-quality foods through school feeding programmes); and (iv) health systems (counselling and social and behaviour change communication to improve maternal diet, appropriate gestational weight gain, and optimal infant and young child feeding practices). We conclude by presenting a step-by-step guide for programme officers and policy makers in LMIC with actionable objectives to address overweight and obesity.

Objective: There is a recognised need to strengthen capacity in the nutrition in emergencies sector and for greater clarity on the role of emergency nutritionists and the skills they require. Competency frameworks are an important tool for human resource development and have been developed for several other humanitarian sectors. We therefore developed a technical competency framework for practitioners in nutrition in emergencies. Design: Existing competency frameworks were reviewed and interviews conducted to explore methods used in developing competency frameworks for other sectors. Competencies were identified through interviews with field experts, feedback from course trainees, academic course content and job specifications. Competencies were then categorised and behavioural indicators developed for each. The draft framework was then reviewed by members of the Global Nutrition Cluster and modified in an iterative process. Setting: Global. Subjects: Not applicable. Results: A wide range of competencies were identified as essential for nutritionists working in emergencies, covering technical skills and general core competencies. The proposed framework contains twenty competency areas with 161 behavioural indicators categorised into three levels, corresponding to the requirements of progressively more senior roles. Many of the competencies are common across development and emergency nutrition. Conclusions:The proposed technical competency framework should prove to be a valuable tool in creating standards within the sector and promoting effective capacity strengthening and professionalisation. Continued research is needed to validate the framework, optimise methods for assessment, develop approaches to integrate it within the sector and measure its impact on performance.

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The Nutrition Embedding Evaluation Programme (NEEP) was a global 4-year program (2013–2017) funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development created to respond to gaps in the nutrition evidence base. The NEEP implementing agency—PATH—provided grants and evaluation technical assistance (ETA) to civil society organizations (CSOs) from 12 countries to conduct robust nutrition-related impact evaluations. The programmatic approach of having an intermediary agent to manage the funding and ETA mechanisms for nutrition impact evaluations is rare and therefore provides a unique opportunity to understand its effectiveness. Over the program duration, NEEP collected lessons learned that were analyzed and disaggregated into key themes considered critical for the completion of high-quality impact evaluations. From these lessons learned, NEEP provides an ETA program model that can be replicated or adapted to other international development sectors. This model highlights the key role of the three tiers (donor, ETA manager, and CSOs) in ensuring the best value for money and effective technical support for conducting impact evaluations and fostering the importance of knowledge uptake and evaluative culture for maximum knowledge diffusion. In this way, global research can be targeted to approaches that provide options to collaborate with the program implementers and contribute to a holistic evidence base to inform policy and programmatic decisions.