The four main focus areas of the Global Nutrition Cluster are:
(1) Coordination: organisations often focus on one or parts of the underlying causes of under-nutrition often without coordination. Part of this is due to a lack of leadership among the normative agencies and part is the lack of incentives to work together as agencies compete for diminishing funds and position. Defined and measurable goals with negotiated strategies and benchmarks to achieve these goals will provide the basis to coordinate.
(2) Capacity Building: changing needs combined with mobile technical staff and often depleted national capacity strongly suggests that to have a predictable, standardised and sufficient response in emergencies requires a strategy that understands the needs, organizes the materials and is flexible enough to start to meet the needs.
(3) Emergency Preparedness, Assessment, Monitoring, Surveillance: The onset of a humanitarian disaster is often plagued by ambiguous and untimely information. The confusion arising out of reports extends to sectors and determinants of poor nutrition that reflect the lack of systematic information gathering, analysis, and reporting. There is a clear need for a commonly agreed upon methodology for what to collect, from whom, by whom and a process for analysis, interpretation and reporting especially among nutrition, health, agriculture, and water to ensure the best information is available for resource allocation and response.
(4) Supply: Too many examples exist of humanitarian response delayed by a lack of appropriate supplies. Stockpiling supplies, facilitating in-country procurement, and clarifying operational procedures for procurement would greatly remedy this gap. The selection of products hampers response.