Faith, empowerment, church and community mobilisation advocacy: insights from Tearfund’s partner in Uganda

Tearfund, a Christian faith-based international non-governmental organisation, has for 15 years supported local churches to mobilise communities through a process called Church and Community Mobilisation (CCM). The CCM advocacy pilot project in Uganda led to improvements in service delivery. In this paper, Tearfund and Making All Voices Count staff discuss recent research that examines the role of local churches, CCM and CCM advocacy in fostering transparency, citizen empowerment, inclusion and government responsiveness. The key themes they examine are social capital and the distinctive nature of faith-based mobilisation; faith and empowerment, both individual and collective; community mobilisation, strategic advocacy and shifting the power dynamics between local-level government officials and citizens; and scaling up local-level accountability successes to the national level.DFIDUSAIDSidaOmidyar Networ

Consensus criteria for the diagnosis of frontotemporal cognitive and behavioural syndromes in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is increasingly recognized to be a multisystem disorder which includes both clinical and neuropathological features of a frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). In order to provide a common framework within which to discuss the characteristics of the cognitive and behavioural syndromes of ALS, and with which to conduct clinical and neuropathological research, an international research workshop on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and ALS was held in London, Canada in June 2007. The recommendations arising from this research workshop address the requirement for a concise clinical diagnosis of the underlying motor neuron disease (Axis I), defining the cognitive and behavioural dysfunction (Axis II), describing additional non-motor manifestations (Axis III) and identifying the presence of disease modifiers (Axis IV