SMART Training Empowers Food Crisis Investigators

By Winston Mbanda

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in collaboration with Action Against Hunger- Canada (ACF-CA), recognizing the need for a standardized methodology in data collection, entry and analysis, organized a one week training in Standardized Monitoring and Assessment in Relief and Transition (SMART) methodology for key people charged with validating nutritional and mortality data. SMART’s objective is to make the data collection as easy as possible for field staff and as reliable as possible for decision-makers.

Due to the severe food crisis in the eastern horn of Africa, a number of organizations are interested in collecting nutritional and mortality data from affected countries like Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti. Most of the organizations working in these countries lacked common and standardized methods to guide them in data collection, entry and analysis. Therefore, CDC and ACF-CA sought to enhance capacity through a SMART methodology workshop, which should ensure and encourage organizations to use this standardized methodology   in the hope that it will lead to high quality data collection.

The SMART methodology is an improved and standardized survey method based on the two most vital and basic public health indicators used to assess the severity of a humanitarian crisis: nutritional status of children under-five and the mortality rate of a population.  The survey is simplified enough to be used by field staff with limited epidemiological and statistical knowledge.  A survey manual with accompanying software called Emergency Nutrition Assessment (ENA) has the capacity to check for plausibility data and generate reports ensuring standardized collection of high quality data and it also has EPI_ENA hybrid software which is used for any advanced analysis of the data.

The training, which was conducted at KEMRI headquarters in Nairobi, was meant to enhance the capacity of organizations to respond to nutritional emergencies and develop technical skills to conduct nutritional and mortality assessments. About 26 participants from Kenya, Somalia and Uganda attended the training which was facilitated by Dr. Oleg Bilukha, Medical Epidemiologist from CDC-Atlanta, Aurore Virayie and Victoria Sauveplane, both SMART Survey Specialists from ACF-Canada, Yara Sfeir, Program Lead at ACF-Canada and Yacob Yishak, Health and Nutrition Coordinator for Concern Worldwide. CDC-Kenya’s Refugee Health Program supported the training.

Apart from building capacity, the training creates a pool of trainers across the agencies. Yacob Yishak, Health and Nutrition Coordinator at Concern Worldwide, is a beneficiary of the previous trainings and is now a facilitator. He attended his first training in Uganda in 2010 then attended two more trainings before he qualified to be a facilitator.  Yara Sfeir, mentioned the benefits of the training as “helping to standardize tools and approach to data collection and standardize the definition of tools and indicators. It will help in checking the data quality and also facilitate data sharing.”

Edward Kutondo, Nutrition Officer (Information Systems) at UNICEF, was one of the participants and said, “I am now happy that more managers from NGOs have been trained on SMART methodology. This will allow them to provide sound technical support to district nutritionists, survey consultants and their own organizations.”