Evaluation of the community-based outpatient therapeutic feeding program implementation for managing children with severe acute malnutrition in Northwest Ethiopia: A mixed-method evaluation protocol.

Severe acute malnutrition is a public health problem that remains the underlying cause for over half of under-five mortality in Ethiopia. As a result, community-based therapeutic care has been launched in the country to address these problems and maximize population-level impact by improving treatment coverage, access, and cost-effectiveness. Despite its achievement, the program has been threatened with unfavourable treatment outcomes and a shortfall of resources. Hence, this implementation evaluation study will also identify gaps between healthcare systems and service users. The output will help programmers pass evidence-based and sound decisions to tackle the key barriers.