More than nutrition: How we provide holistic support to local and national nutrition actors

The benefits of working with local and national organizations are well documented. Enabling local organizations to drive interventions ensures more contextually appropriate programs, increases access to marginalized groups, and supports local solutions to local problems.

We also have an ethical obligation to enable national organizations to lead humanitarian action more often and more intentionally – which means correcting the imbalance of power between international and local and national actors in the communities that they serve.

The  GNC Technical Alliance conceptualizes localisation as an approach that requires recognition, respect, appreciation, and investment in local and national humanitarian capacities, leadership, and local and national resources. This approach ultimately serves to replace this imbalance with more locally-driven, locally-led, and locally-owned responses to better and more sustainably meet the nutrition needs of affected populations (inspired by The Grand Bargain,  Arbie Baguios, and Oxfam).

From theory to practice

Over the last eight years, the GNC Technical Alliance has supported local and national actors with technical nutrition know-how and support all over the world, including Somalia and Uganda. These efforts have gone a long way towards equipping local and national actors to effectively deliver top-quality nutrition interventions in their communities.

However, we recognize the need to change how we provide support moving forward to ensure it is comprehensive and centers the work of national organizations as leaders in humanitarian action. We acknowledge that often organizations come to us eager for more robust support that extends beyond nutrition support – including HR, finance, logistics, monitoring & evaluation, general program management, and fundraising – and that we have a duty to support national organizations more in these areas in order to improve their capacity to deliver and sustain effective Nutrition in Emergencies (NiE) responses.

That’s why this year, as part of our ongoing anti-racism and localisation efforts, we’ve launched a new initiative aiming to provide more holistic support to local and national actors delivering nutrition interventions. The initiative is being piloted in Mali, Somalia, and Syria.

This new initiative will provide a comprehensive package of support covering both organizational and nutrition, with the objective of strengthening nutrition interventions for affected communities.

Working together with the Nutrition Cluster Coordination teams in each country, the GNC Technical Alliance has selected between four to five national organizations in each of the three countries to take part.

These selected organizations have been assessed to determine their current organizational and NiE capacity, along with their unique strengths and areas for improvement. From there, tailored and clearly defined initiatives will be designed for each organization to strengthen their organizational effectiveness and efficiency; their ability to deliver high quality NiE interventions; and their ability, access, and influence within coordination mechanisms.

Are you a local or national actor? We are here to support you

Are you a local or national nutrition actor doing great work in your community, but could use support in nutrition and beyond? We might be able to help your team through a blended package of NiE technical and organizational capacity strengthening support. You can request support here.

This support would be based on your needs and could include training in project cycle management, proposal and report writing, leadership & management, monitoring & evaluation, and safety & security management, and more. To improve your capacity in nutrition, we could provide training in infant and young child feeding in emergency training and action plan development, training and coaching in community-based management of acute malnutrition, support for nutrition data analysis, support in understanding and developing a MAMI Care Pathway, or developing a behavior change strategy.

We hope that this new initiative will be the first of many as we aim to provide more support to local and national organizations in the future. And if you would like to learn more about localisation, we have numerous resources available here to foster reflections.

Click here to request technical nutrition support.
Learn more about the GNC Alliance’s commitment to anti-racism and localisation (Anti-racism & Localisation Workstream).