Establish a nutritional surveillance system with an early warning approach in 90 municipalities

The nutritional surveillance system will have an early warning approach for assessing the nutritional and health status of children under 5 years of age in communities that are prioritised to act as ‘sentinel sites.’ As the national coordinating body for food and nutrition security, the Food Security and Nutritional Unit will be responsible for leading the implementation of the nutritional surveillance system, in coordination with the Ministry of Health as the governing body of the health sector.

The nutritional surveillance system will be operated locally. It will be run by a specialist technical unit within existing municipal bodies, whether they are public or non-public institutions. Communities will be selected (at least one per municipality) to serve as sentinel sites, in which volunteer staff will form a nutritional surveillance committee. This committee will be responsible for monitoring indicators to determine children’s nutritional status (weight, height, age) as well as recording information on the state of their health (incidences of diarrhoea, respiratory infections, signs or symptoms of anaemia, among other things). The data monitored in the sentinel sites will be sent to the relevant municipal body on a monthly basis. The technical team for each municipal body will analyse and issue the relevant alerts to be presented to the local government. This latter will be responsible for managing and providing care, following guidelines for the management of priority health situations, within the framework of the intersectoral discussions (LN29:2020).

The implementation of these initiatives will be divided into three stages. The first will consist of selecting the first 40 municipalities that will pilot the nutritional surveillance systems, as well as prioritising communities that will function as sentinel sites. Municipal teams and community committees will be formed and trained. This phase is expected to be completed in the first two years. The second phase will consist of putting the nutritional surveillance systems into operation. This will require a mechanism for the approval and feedback of lessons learned in order to refine the methodology. This is expected to be completed by the fourth year (2025). Finally, the third stage will consist of replicating the methodology across other prioritised territories, reaching a total of 90 municipalities that will have an operational nutritional surveillance system by the end of 2030.