The GNC Technical Alliance, was established in 2017 to provide technical assistance and support to countries, agencies, and nutrition practitioners in humanitarian situations to meet the nutrition rights and needs of people affected by emergencies.

The Alliance is the technical arm of the GNC and responds to all technical requests for nutrition in emergencies (NiE) programming.

Why did the GNC add the Technical Alliance?

In 2015, gaps were identified in the mechanisms to address nutrition technical needs in humanitarian contexts. Historically, the nutrition community has lacked an overarching platform in how to provide strategic direction to address technical capacity gaps at the country level. 

While the GNC worked to fill this need, there was a gap in how to address those needs – as they relate to technical training, guidance, and support – in the long term. As a result, the GNC Technical Alliance (known as the Alliance), a partnership of NGOs, UNICEF and the GNC, was established to respond to additional needs for technical programme support to Nutrition Clusters and partners.

The Alliance provides the following support:

  1. Access to high-quality information, capacity strengthening resources, guidance and learning;
  2. Where guidance is limited, timely access to interim consensus-driven guidance, including guidance on program adaptation; 
  3. Access to experienced nutrition technical specialists to answer questions, or to provide more in-depth support (remote or in-country).
For more information on what the Alliance does, watch this brief video.

Areas of work

The Alliance is part of a broader GNC structure and consists of three pillars of work: 

  1. Provision of technical support
    • Technical support is delivered by the Technical Support Team (TST). The TST includes both NiE technical and NiE coordination expertise and is available to support any organisation, government, or sector/cluster coordination mechanism that is preparing for, responding to, or recovering from a nutrition crisis.
  2. Global Thematic Working Groups 
    • Global Thematic Working Groups (GTWG), involve key individuals who specialize in specific technical areas of nutrition in emergencies policy and practice who are available to provide advice on technical queries, or interim guidance, in the absence of normative guidance or knowledge. Currently there are groups for Wasting, IYCF-E, NIS and Cash and Voucher Assistance in Nutrition.
  3. Monitoring and knowledge management
    • The Alliance aims to develop and disseminate high quality learning and capacity strengthening products (including webinars and trainings), that are informed by country-level technical priorities and fill an identified gap in knowledge and learning.
 
 

Support of the pillars is provided by in-country or remote support from technical experts and recommendations from vetted consultants. The Alliance support services are available to any nutrition actor including governments, national and international NGOs, UN agencies, Red Cross/Crescent Societies and others.

Visit the GNC Technical Alliance website to learn more about thematic areas of support, workstreams, the team, and how to request technical support.

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