Severe malnutrition is still a huge global problem. To treat it in low-resource settings, an intervention that is generally considered best practice is community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM), which consists of providing underweight children with a nutrient-enriched peanut butter formula alongside basic medical care.
Taimaka, one of our Promising Charities, delivers CMAM through community health workers in northeastern Nigeria, thereby, reducing costs and increasing cost-effectiveness. We asked their Director of Partnerships, Sarah Xu, to walk us through what that looks like in practice.
Their answers reflect practitioner experience rather than formal research findings. These do not necessarily represent HLI’s views.
In your own words, what does Taimaka do?
“Taimaka treats children suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in Nigeria. SAM is a life-threatening condition that can have lifelong effects on cognitive and emotional development. We treat children with SAM over 6-12 weekly visits, providing therapeutic food, medication, and inpatient hospital care when needed.”
Taimaka delivers care through community health workers rather than doctors or nurses. What does it take to make that model work well?
“We upskill our community health workers through training and our digital app that guides our staff through each step of the treatment process and collects data that helps us monitor and improve our program.
Our app runs on smartphones used by staff at each facility. Based on the child’s weight, height, test results (e.g., malaria, HIV), and data from previous visits, the app helps staff ask relevant questions to assess the child’s health status and produces decisions for treatment including the dose of therapeutic food for that week and whether the child should receive ACTs for malaria treatment. This standardizes high-quality care for children in our CMAM program and provides us with over 300 data points on a child’s health, allowing us to quickly identify cases that are falling behind and may need additional attention.”
What role do families and caregivers play in the treatment process? How do you work with them?
“Caregivers and families are essential to the treatment process, bringing their children to our facilities for care and administering medication and therapeutic food for their child at home. Some caregivers walk for hours to bring their child for treatment.
At each weekly visit in our program, we provide RUTF [Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food], a therapeutic food designed to treat malnutrition, for the caregiver to feed their child throughout the week. If the child needs medication to treat an illness such as malaria, we show caregivers how to administer the medication. We host meetings in the communities we serve to share updates and answer questions about our work.”
Malnutrition in early childhood can have lifelong effects on cognitive and emotional development. How does Taimaka think about that longer arc?
“One reason we treat malnutrition in children under five is that malnutrition can have lifelong effects on cognitive and emotional development.
We’re excited about the long-term impact of our work, particularly the Happier Lives Institute’s finding that Taimaka is likely an extremely cost-effective way to increase long-term wellbeing.”
What would need to be true for acute malnutrition in Nigeria to no longer be the crisis it is today? What do you imagine “solving” the problem to look like?
“In my personal view, acute malnutrition in Nigeria will no longer be the crisis it is today when economic growth reduces food insecurity and increases access to medical care (children often develop SAM after contracting a disease that makes them lose weight rapidly). This economic growth will likely happen over decades, and until then, Taimaka is dedicated to treating acute malnutrition.”
We thank Taimaka for their time and their thoughtful answers. To learn more about their work, you can read our evaluation. You can donate to Taimaka here.
This blog post is part of a series of interviews with our recommended charities. You can read the other conversations with Friendship Bench and Pure Earth to better understand their work.