This is a big question. There is a workshop in Addis next week discussing this issue. ACF have a method in development that is a two-stage cluster-sampled method that uses a qualitative first phase to create a sampling frame, systematic sampling to select PSUs, posterior weighting (rather than PPS style prior weighting), a bootstrap estimator, census sampling of selected PSUs, and a MUAC case-definition. A field trial in Mali (last year) was very encouraging and ACF are looking to develop the method further. You should contact ACF at: [url=mailto:mnco@et.missions-acf.org]mnco@et.missions-acf.org[/url] For details of the workshop. If you cannot come then I suggest that you contact me via ENN and we can discuss this in detail.

Actually a field article based on the ACF work in Mali that Mark was involved with, will be included in Field Exchange 35 - this issue should be online by the end of the week. It describes a new method for assessing acute malnutrition in nomadic pastoralist populations. I'll post a message once it's there.

Thanks. I was not sure when that article would come out That article should give you a pretty good idea of what the proposed method looks like. There is also a short article in FE issue 33 (http://www.ennonline.net/fex/33/fex33.pdf) which describes some earlier work by ACF in this area.

The article describing the Mali pilot is at [url]http://www.ennonline.net/fex/35/fex35.pdf[/url].