M&E, research and evidence generation
Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition Plus (MQSUN+) provides support for the development or review of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks and plans for new or existing Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) country national policies/plans or United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) programmes. This process may include developing workshop presentations and facilitating stakeholder discussions for consensus on the framework and/or plan.
MQSUN+ recently supported the development of an M&E framework for the Karamoja Nutrition Programme for DFID Uganda. This included the identification of appropriate programme indicators and related data sources, the development of a logical framework and the provision of input for the Nutrition Information System.
MQSUN+ also supports SUN and DFID efforts to assess and/or improve the availability, quality and use for decision-making of nutrition data. This includes examining current nutrition data sources and indicators for M&E, identifying any existing data gaps and providing recommendations on where data can be strengthened—including whether the available data are pertinent to assessing nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions within a given context. The project also reviews national nutrition surveillance systems and identifies areas for improvement for institutionalising these systems, and supports the integration of nutrition indicators in other sector programmes.
MQSUN+ is currently supporting DFID to analyse existing data for countries in the Sahel to recommend an evidence-based core minimum package of nutrition support, especially for locales with limited resources, and to develop a research proposal to determine the impact of this approach and articulate ways to strengthen data collection and analysis.
MQSUN+ supports the analysis of gaps in nutrition-related research areas to aid nutrition action, programme and policy change—or the steps required along the way for achieving these changes. This can include desk reviews, systematic literature reviews, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analyses and other analyses of existing evidence.
MQSUN+ collates existing nutrition research and evidence to highlight the most current knowledge on key technical topics, such as gender and nutrition, private sector engagement in nutrition, the aetiology of wasting, famine-related data collection and use, bridging humanitarian-development efforts for nutrition, integrating nutrition into schools and value for money approaches for nutrition.