This year's edition of the IPC Global Event was attended by around 50 participants, including representatives of global IPC stakeholders, partner and donor agencies, regional inter-government bodies (CILSS, IGAD, SAARC and SICA) and national government representatives.

In the morning, the discussion involved Government representatives from 6 countries, who highlighted the added value of the IPC Chronic Food Insecurity Scale and focused on: (i) Distinction between chronic and acute situations; (ii) Use of multi-sectorial information and analyses based on technical consensus; (iii) Identification of data gaps and good practice for data collection methods; (iv) Identification of the key drivers of chronic food insecurity, which allow to better inform medium and long-term planning, policies and programmes etc.

Country representatives also shared their plans for using IPC Chronic findings in 2015 and 2016 to guide the development of key planning and policy documents, including: Agricultural development/Investment Plans and Strategies, National Development Plans, Food Security and Nutrition Policies and Action Plans, and Sub-national level plans and projects.

In the afternoon, the discussion mainly focussed on the learning and feedback from the first round of IPC Nutrition country pilots, conducted in Kenya, South Sudan, and Bangladesh. The main feedback received is that the IPC Acute Malnutrition Scale has been very useful for countries since it has not only helped classify acute malnutrition outcomes based on an international scale, but it has also helped identify key malnutrition contributing factors. Two of the 3 countries that piloted the tool have already started using it in their policy and programming, even though the tools have not been finalised yet. It is expected that the IPC Acute Malnutrition Scale will be finalised by December 2015.

The event concluded with a round of statements from representatives of the Regional Inter-government Bodies, namely CILSS, IGAD, SAARC, and SICA, who shared their perspectives on the progress achieved in the framework of the IPC Global Strategic Programme (2014-2018) and plans for the next three years. Even though new and existing partners expressed a strong interest as well as different levels of engagement in the implementation of IPC from the side of the technical community, additional efforts are needed to promote the uptake of IPC at institutional and policy level. 

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