Nutrition Surveillance Systems: Their use and value

Nutrition Surveillance Systems was stimulated by the growing need for data on nutrition outcomes to track changes over time and assess the progress of nations towards international development goals – such as the World Health Assembly global nutrition targets.

This comprehensive review assesses the use and value of nutrition data for a number of other purposes – including early warning of malnutrition, to guide the development of national and regional policies and programmes, and to evaluate their impact on populations.

This review also examines the wide variety of methods used to collect data for nutrition surveillance, giving many examples from past and current data collection systems. It goes on to assess how those data are used for decision-making and the dissemination of findings in forms that are accessible to different audiences, and describes the problems that may arise with ownership, capacity building and the sustainability of nutrition surveillance systems.