Please Follow: [url]http://www.fantaproject.org/publications/CMAM_costing_tool.shtml[/url] Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) is an innovative approach for managing acute malnutrition in children within the community that enables early detection of cases, expanded access to treatment in decentralized sites, greater community involvement and support, and extended coverage. The CMAM Costing Tool is a Microsoft Excel-based application that estimates the costs of implementing CMAM at the national, sub-national, and district levels. The Costing Tool calculates the inputs and financial resources required to establish, maintain, or expand CMAM services. This information helps managers determine whether their plans for CMAM are financially feasible, identify the resources needed, and formulate an effective implementation plan. The Costing Tool can also support the promotion and management of CMAM services. Government or NGO stakeholders in a country or region where acute malnutrition is prevalent can use the CMAM Costing Tool to plan for implementation of specific CMAM components and forecast the resources required. Costing Tool users enter a modest amount of key country-specific data, such as statistics on malnutrition, distances between key administration facilities, and prices of goods. The Costing Tool automatically processes these and other data that are preloaded in the Costing Tool to calculate resource requirements and costs of implementing CMAM for a geographic region and time specified by the user. Accompanying the CMAM Costing Tool Workbook are three additional files: a User's Guide, a case study workbook, and a completed exercise. The User's Guide explains the scope and limitations of the Tool, outlines how the different worksheets are related, identifies which worksheets and cells require data from the user and explains how to obtain the data to be entered, describes the assumptions underlying the calculations, provides guidance on how to interpret the results, and includes a sample exercise to give the user a guided opportunity to practice using the CMAM Costing Tool with actual data for one district. The Case Study provides an opportunity to view a completed CMAM Costing Tool Workbook using data from an actual situation. The corrected exercise allows the user to see how the User's Guide exercise should have been completed. Please note that this version of the CMAM Costing Tool (February 2011) is limited to dealing with the management of severe acute malnutrition. Costing Tool exercise, case study, corrected exercise, and workbook can be found attached to this email. Support for the costing tool was provided by USAID's Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and Bureau for Global Health's Office of Health, Infectious Diseases, and Nutrition.