Definitions:
‘Local church' refers to a sustainable community of local Christian believers, who come together to worship, study the bible,and pray. The ‘local church’ may meet in a church building, community building, school hall, someone’s home or outside, anywhere where they gather together.
This is the individual local congregation as opposed to denomination.
Here local churches counted should be active in CCT: they must have started and have been doing a CCT process in the past 6 months.
‘Integration into CCT’ will be defined by churches which have one of the following elements:
a) CCT advocacy or social accountability is a formalised part of the CCT training process and is seen in the overall project through outlined advocacy objectives, indicators and deliverables that will be monitored and measured at project level.
b). Stand alone CCT Advocacy & Social accountability innovation initiatives taken by the church despite no formalised inclusion in the project objectives.
c). Local churches involvement in national campaigns as a result of National church leaders being envisioned and mobilised to influence national governments through campaigns e.g. Haiti We Want, Zimbabwe we want, Born amongst us etc
d) Church led communities that are engaging local governments on issues that affect the community using advocacy approaches and tools e.g. Social accountability tools (not necessary doing CCT e.g Church Mobilisation,)
Integration should lead local churches to be actively 'engaging decision makers'.
‘Engaging decision makers’ in this context defines where communities have been able to have meeting with decision makers at their levels to ask for change on issues that communities have identified as priority area.This could include any of the following:
communicated with decision makers through calls, email, policy briefs,letter or petition
invited decision makers to community meetings to listen, held a community meeting with decision makers to discuss issues identified used digital platforms to participate in governance and planning, collect, analyse and use data as evidence to advocate for change
‘Using Social Accountability tools to engage in local or national advocacy’ in this context refers to where communities are using any of the social accountability tools to advocate for change on issues that they have identified as priority areas.
Some examples of the social accountability tools:
- Community Score Cards
- Government Budget Tracking tool / Public Expenditure Tracking tool
- School Score Cards
- Social Contracts/Memorandum of understanding
- Public planning processesing
- Right to Information legislation
How?
To track the number of churches who are using CCT advocacy or social accountability tools,, facilitators should fill in monitoring forms which records their activities with churches. Monitoring forms should capture the activities that have taken place and outcome / progress. As part of this monitoring process, facilitators are encouraged to also hold 6 monthly or annual focus group discussions with church and community members, using the Light Wheel toolkit and maturity model to capture the difference that these activities are having on the community.
Coordinators can use this data as part of wider M&E plans to use the Light Wheel methodology to conduct wider evaluations to better understand how these activities are contributing to change.
Where Tearfund has had a catalytic role, church denominations or other allies should be encouraged to take this approach to help them effectively support facilitators.
Who collects?
CCT coordinators or trainers should collect facilitator's monitoring forms.
This should be then shared with Tearfund every 6 months.
If Tearfund is playing a catalytic role, the collection will be done by partner denomination trainers/personnel and can be shared with Tearfund at the discretion of the partner.
The Partner Advocacy Lead, Social Accountability Advisor, Regional Advocacy Advisors and/or Country Advocacy Officers can provide advice and support on advocacy mapping and tracking the congregation / denomination / mother body / network advocacy activities
