Earlier today in Abuja, the Federal Ministry of Health of Nigeria officially launched the Health Sector Recommendations for Nutrition Indicators Collected Nationally in Nigeria. This document is a key output from the ongoing collaboration between the government of Nigeria, its development partners, and DataDENT towards strengthening Nigeria’s National Nutrition Information System (NIS).
Nigeria’s nutrition stakeholders rely on data collected from a range of sources including national surveys and administrative systems that are overseen by different actors from inside and outside the nutrition sector. Efforts have been made to add nutrition content to individual data sources such as the National Health Management Information System/DHIS-2. However, a lack of coordination across data sources contributes to data gaps and challenges with data quality and data comparability.
The recommendations help to address these issues by:
• Identifying health sector priorities for nutrition data collected through national surveys and administrative data systems
• Making practical suggestions for the inclusion of priority indicators across national surveys and administrative data systems that factor in the costs of data collection
• Presenting considerations for putting these recommendations into practice
Primary audiences include government, donors, and other development partners who develop nutrition monitoring frameworks and who are involved in the planning, implementing, and financing of national-level nutrition data collection.
The recommendations are notable both for their content and the process used to develop them. To draft the recommendations, the FMOH’s Nutrition Division convened a NIS Task Team of 15 members who represented a range of nutrition data stakeholders. DataDENT provided this Task Team with meeting facilitation and document drafting support and also carried out a series of formative research activities to inform their efforts (Figure). DataDENT partner Results for Development developed a costing framework to help guide the prioritization of recommendations.
A number of countries are working to advance NIS design and implementation. You can download Nigeria’s nutrition data recommendations document here and learn more about the collaborative process used in Nigeria in our DataDENT brief.
DataDENT is also contributing to other efforts to support NIS design including our collaboration with WHO-UNICEF TEAM on Guidance on National Nutrition Information Systems. Technical Notes produced by DataDENT will be available soon.