uHarambe | Social Development Course

Welcome

Habari. Welcome to Mfundo.

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Course description

Harambe is a societal value of collective action in which people come together as a whole society to address shared challenges and pursue common goals. Uharambe is the underlying value of prizing society, and in social work and development terms, uharambee is social development itself: the deliberate, whole of society pursuit of collective wellbeing. In short, harambee is the action, uharambee is the value, and together they describe social development carried out at the societal level.

Uharambee or uharambe means valuing society or coming together as a society. In Shona, which contributed to the creation of Swahili, ramba means refuse while haarambe means no one refuses. Harambee could be the Swahilised version of haarambe, meaning who can refuse to be part of it, or you cannot refuse to be part of what you are, society. The extra e at the end of harambee marks a high tone or emphasis, similar to saying haarambe. Other versions claiming a Hindu origin have been discredited. In Kenya, harambee was popularised by the Jomo Kenyatta government, which called on society to pull together labour, resources and effort for national development.

Ubuntu is expressed through values such as ukama (relational), ujamaa (communal), umvelo (environmental), harambee (societal), and uroho (spiritual and moral), which together guide how people relate to relationships, community, nature, society, and moral life.

Course learning outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Outcome 1: Define harambee, uharambee, and social development, and explain how uharambee is equated with social development within the broader framework of Ubuntu philosophy, social work and development.

Outcome 2: Analyse the linguistic and etymological origins of the term harambee, including its roots in Shona and Swahili (haarambe), while identifying and dismissing discredited origin myths.

Outcome 3: Distinguish society from community, and apply the three part test, plus its disqualifier, to determine whether a given initiative or policy qualifies as harambee, and therefore as social development, for social work purposes.

Outcome 4: Define the harambee social development model, explain its Ubuntu based systems view across five levels, individual and family, community, society, environment and spirit, and compare it with the African Social Development approach and Midgley’s social development model.

Outcome 5: Explain the harambee view that economic growth flows from economic justice and collective effort, such as land reform and the empowerment of women, and apply the ASD Model and DSW Approach to design macro level, integrated socio-economic strategies that address structural root causes of poverty.

Outcome 6: Design a social development intervention that states a societal purpose from the outset, is mapped across the five Ubuntu based levels, passes the three part test and disqualifier, and is built with a macro level connection in place from the start, evaluating it against real world examples of societal level interventions.