Improved access to integrated nutrition services for most vulnerable children and pregnant lactating women in newly accessible areas of Borno State. This project aims at strengthening access to quality integrated nutrition services for the most vulnerable malnourished children and women in newly accessible areas of Borno State. It will facilitate access to life-saving nutrition services through early detection and referral of malnourished children to nutrition service centres for appropriate nutrition services. 
The limited capacity of health care workers in the face of a high need to increase access to life saving treatment is an additional justification for the choice of these areas and the proposed strategy is to strengthen the capacity of existing government health workers and deploy additional Health Workers (HWs) in reception sites and Internally Displaced Population (IDP) camps to address gaps in those areas. This is in addition to the poor community mobilization that is associated with a lack of robust community systems that promote nutrition education and address misunderstandings and misperceptions on the causes of undernutrition and lack of awareness on the availability of free-life-saving nutrition services. These issues have further exposed vulnerable children to morbidity and mortality due to malnutrition. 

UNICEF supports the Borno SPHCDA to provide integrated life-saving nutrition services to the under-5 children and pregnant and lactating women (PLW) in the priority areas. The services are provided through fixed health facilities and mobile nutrition teams to ensure access to quality nutrition services. UNICEF has signed  program cooperation agreements (PCAs) with 14 non-governmental organizations  to provide curative and preventive services  in Kaga, Monguno, Bama, Dikwa, Gwoza, Mobbar, Kala-Balge, Ngala and Nganzai LGAs. UNICEF provides these NGOs with ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) and therapeutic milk for the treatment of acute malnutrition and with technical support for counselling of caregivers on adequate infant and child feeding. As UNICEF cannot essentially directly implement activities, LGA facilitators have been deployed in the proposed LGAs through a third party Deloitte company. These facilitators will provide independent monitoring as well as  onsite coaching and supportive supervision to improve the quality of the services. The LGA facilitators also ensure quality of the coordination among nutrition actors. UNICEF has entered into a partnership with local NGO Ekklisiyar Yanuwa A Nigeria (EYN) to deploy nutrition supervisors at ward level to enhance capacity of community nutrition mobilizers (CNMs) to strengthen community mobilization activities for timely detection of SAM children, their admission and follow up.
It is against this background that UNICEF is proposing to support the SPHCDA and partners to build the capacity of HWs working in the targeted LGAs as well as strengthen community mobilization through the community based organizations to ensure availability, access and utilization of life saving nutrition services for the most vulnerable newly arrival children, PLW in reception sites and IDP camps. Availability of RUTF for these location is another major challenge for continuation of live saving nutrition services. UNICEF has been providing these services with other funding sources but these sources are ending and influx of new arrivals in the targeted sites are increasing, therefore, UNICEF has proposed to procure 40percent of the annual nutrition supply requirement based on the HRP target from the NHF grant for proposed LGAs to ensure nutrition services are continued and are available to beneficiaries.

This project is to support the following aspects:
a. Identification and treatment of children with SAM children in reception sites and IDP camps 
b. Protection, promotion and support of optimal IYCF practices 
c. Procurement of life saving nutrition supplies namely RUTF, F75, F100 and ReSoMal
d. Conduction of a SMART nutrition survey to estimate malnutrition among new arrivals and other children of IDP camp