Valid International

Valid International is a limited company registered in the UK. The company was founded by Drs Steve Collins and Alistair Hallam in 1999 to improve the quality, impact and accountability of global health and nutrition interventions. Valid pioneered the Community‐based Therapeutic Care (CTC) model for addressing Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) at scale and the local production of Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), and was the central force behind the advocacy leading to the endorsement of the model under the name Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) by the UN and multiple national governments in 2007. To date, the approach has been adopted in over 60 countries worldwide. Valid International has also developed innovative approaches for needs assessment and monitoring and evaluation of the coverage and effectiveness of interventions, including Simple Spatial Survey Method (S3M), Rapid Assessment Method (RAM), Semi-quantitative Evaluation of Access and Coverage (SQUEAC), and Simplified Lot Quality Assurance Sampling Evaluation of Access and Coverage (SLEAC). Whilst this work initially focused explicitly on the assessment/evaluation of nutrition interventions we now provide services for secondary contextual data analysis, needs assessment and primary data collection that includes assessment of intervention coverage and impact evaluation across multiple sectors - from nutrition and health to WASH and livelihood security. We aim to make assessments faster, lower cost, more precise and ultimately more useful. We do this through our focus on metrics (development of context appropriate indicators), analytics (assessment methods that support smaller sample sizes, sophisticated statistics and geospatial mapping of indicators) and technology (that supports electronic data collection and bespoke data analysis to enable real time reporting of data on-the-go – online or off).