Nutrition in Emergencies

Description

Disasters like droughts, floods and wars lead to acute and chronic health problems, especially malnutrition. During emergencies, large numbers of affected and displaced people depend on external assistance, at least in the acute phase of disasters. Governments, NGOs and UN agencies all provide nutritional support to these people at one time or another. However, without the necessary knowledge and skills to manage such situations, this support has poor output. The course highlights the essential concepts of food and nutrition and provides the students with essential knowledge and skills to deal with nutrition in disastrous situations.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, the participant will be able to:

1. Understand food and nutrition threats pertaining to disasters in order to predict and lessen their impacts
2. Recognize the food supply chain and appropriate food rations in emergency
3. Diagnose the types of malnutrition
4. Conduct rapid nutritional assessment
5. Design nutrition interventions in emergency
6. Promote the importance of breast-feeding during emergency

Course Outline

1. Introduction to food and nutrition
2. Micronutrients
3. Malnutrition
4. Analyzing causes of malnutrition using analytic framework
5. Measuring nutrition status
6. Nutritional indicators
7. Rapid nutritional assessment
8. Food security
9. Common nutrition interventions
10. Selective feeding programs
11. Assessment of selective feeding programs
12. Decision making framework for establishing selective feeding program