DHIS2 for Nutrition

Nutrition programs require timely, integrated data to track child growth, manage acute malnutrition, monitor maternal nutrition, and inform evidence-based interventions. Digital platforms like DHIS2 provide a powerful foundation for collecting, managing, and analyzing nutrition data from health facilities, community-based interventions, and mass campaigns, while enabling integration with health, climate, and food security data.

As a scalable and configurable platform, DHIS2 serves as the backbone for national nutrition information systems, supporting use cases such as growth monitoring and promotion, community-based management of acute malnutrition, maternal counseling, infant and young child feeding programs, vitamin A supplementation campaigns, and nutrition surveillance. DHIS2 enables countries and organizations to combine aggregate indicators, individual patient tracking, and geospatial data in a single, interoperable system—supporting decision-making from community level to national policy.

The DHIS2 Nutrition toolkit, developed in collaboration with UNICEF, gives countries a practical starting point for integrating standard nutrition indicators into their national DHIS2 systems. It covers key intervention areas and includes dashboards designed to support analysis and decision-making at facility and community levels. 

Nutrition monitoring in DHIS2 can also support cross-sector data integration, linking nutrition outcomes with food security, agriculture, water and sanitation, and climate data to facilitate comprehensive approaches to addressing malnutrition.

Across diverse contexts, DHIS2 is being adapted to support nutrition resilience, program effectiveness, and data-driven decision-making, often in collaboration with ministries of health, international organizations including UNICEF and WHO, nutrition clusters, and implementing partners.

While the features above are broadly applicable, DHIS2 has been adapted to support nutrition programs across multiple regions and contexts. The examples below show how countries and organizations are leveraging DHIS2 for nutrition.

• National nutrition information systems: Indonesia has used DHIS2 as its national data repository since 2018, integrating 13 fragmented nutrition and maternal and child health information systems across 514 district health offices and more than 12,000 facilities into a single unified dashboard.  
• Growth monitoring and promotion programs: In Sri Lanka, public health midwives use a DHIS2-based Android application to enroll malnourished children, track anthropometric measurements over time, and flag household-level risk factors for referral.
• Nutrition surveillance and early warning: Nutrition programs use DHIS2 to collect and analyze surveillance data, monitor trends in malnutrition prevalence, and support early response to emerging risks.
• Humanitarian nutrition coordination: In Yemen, the WHO-led Health Cluster used DHIS2 Tracker to run case-based malnutrition surveillance across 300 facilities and manage therapeutic feeding programs for more than 415,000 children, helping reduce acute malnutrition prevalence among children under 5 from 29% to 21.4% between 2018 and 2020.
• Nutrition monitoring for mobile and pastoral populations: In Ethiopia and Somalia, the ministries of health use a DHIS2 Tracker to monitor nutrition for migratory pastoral communities, maintaining continuous records for children under 5, pregnant women, and lactating mothers across borders.
• School-based feeding programs: The World Food Programme uses the DHIS2 data capture app to manage school feeding data across 315 primary schools in Uganda’s Karamoja region, supporting daily meals for approximately 216,000 students.

Get started with DHIS2 for Nutrition by using these helpful resources:

• Documentation
• DHIS2 NutritionToolkit
• Unicef report on nutrition information
• Nutrition on the DHIS2 Community of Practice