One of the Global Nutrition Targets from the World Health Assembly (WHA) is to halve the number of women of reproductive age affected by anemia by 2025. To this end, SPRING and the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition and the World Health Organization initiated the Accelerated Reduction Effort on Anaemia (AREA) Community of Practice (CoP), an online forum for a diverse coalition of global stakeholders who share a common objective – to expedite the reduction of anemia. The AREA CoP’s aim is to support members of the global community to improve and scale up existing methods and strategies for anemia reduction in a coordinated manner.
The CoP is moderated by SPRING on the Knowledge Gateway website, which serves as the means to centralize membership, discussions, and content, including a library of anemia-related resources. SPRING hosts and moderates webinars on topics related to anemia. The AREA CoP was launched in June 2015 and has rapidly grown to include over 700 members from over 65 countries. The CoP has become a highly-utilized forum that brings together international anemia control practitioners to discuss and debate the challenges faced in anemia reduction to not only meet the new WHA Global Nutrition Targets, but more importantly, to begin making greater strides to reduce the number of lives lost due to anemia.