Jul 25, 2017
Building a Model to Project Treatment of Severe Acute Malnutrition
The Airbel Center at the International Rescue Committee has worked in consultation with the No Wasted Lives Coalition (NWL) to answer the following question: how can we, as a nutrition community, treat six million children a year for severe acute malnutrition (SAM) by 2020? We identified promising innovations in SAM treatment, spoke to experts leading the charge for greater effectiveness and reduced cost, and built a mathematical model to project treatment and cost numbers into the future.
Our colleagues at the IRC — Jeanette Bailey, Casie Tesfai, Annie Zhou, Lara Ho, and the entire Health unit — were instrumental in helping us construct these projections. We were also aided immeasurably by the team at NWL, including Augustin Flory, Saul Guerrero, and Sophie Woodhead, among others. Thanks as well to our generous funders at CIFF.
In order to foster a broader discussion with the nutrition community, one that challenges our assumptions and creates real debate around the paths to scale for different treatment protocols, we are making our model available here. Along with it, we have published a report that details the genesis of this project, and how we arrived at our hypothesis.
Please send any questions or feedback to Carla.Lopez@rescue.org
