Updating National CMAM Guidelines: Lessons learned from previous experiences

National guidelines on Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) or for Integrated Management of Acute Malnutrition (IMAM) provide guidance to the Ministry of Health, UN agencies, and civil society organisations on how organisations on the treatment and management of malnutrition and aim to standardise the delivery of services within a country.  The development or revision of national guidelines is often a long process that involved inputs from many different stakeholders. 

This paper, produced under the Wasting Global Thematic Working Group within the GNC Technical Alliance was a result of an identified need, to explore past experiences of developing and or updating CMAM or IMAM guidelines across a range of diverse countries to better guide the upcoming processes following the WHO normative guideline for wasting treatment which will be released in 2023 that will likely trigger many countries to update their national guidelines. The paper makes several important recommendations for future guideline-developed processes that National Governments, UN agencies and/or Civil Society Organisations may want to consider as they undergo this process in the future. 

The full report and its recommendations can be accessed here.

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