Developmental Social Work Model, integrated socio-economic strategies

This lesson introduces the Developmental Social Work, or DSW, approach, which merges social intervention with economic development, and connects this to the harambee view of how economic growth arises.

DSW scholarship, including work by Mupedziswa in 2001, Lombard and Wairire in 2010, and Hochfeld and colleagues across 2009 and 2010, has argued that purely remedial casework and groupwork maintain social exclusion rather than resolving it. If a person is only ever given case by case relief, their position in the economy never changes. DSW instead pivots toward improving the productive capacity of people living in poverty.

The core characteristics of DSW include maximising forms of production, such as farming, mining, fishing and trading, ensuring access to the means of production, such as through land reform, and creating economically viable forms of social assistance, such as start-up capital, in which public aid functions as a stepping stone toward economic activity rather than an end in itself.

DSW also directly rejects modernisation views that blame African communities, cultures or lifestyles for poverty. Instead, it asserts that economic growth without a human face is itself a driver of inequality.

This is where the harambee model’s distinct view of economic growth becomes important. As set out in Lesson 8, the harambee model treats economic growth as flowing from economic justice and collective effort, such as land reform and the empowerment of women, rather than treating economic growth as a separate input to be pursued alongside social policy. In practice, this means DSW’s core characteristics, land reform, access to production, start-up capital, are not simply economic tools sitting next to harambee. Under the harambee model, they are the mechanism through which economic justice produces growth. Land reform is not only redistribution, it is the correction of a structural unfairness that then permits genuine, broadly shared economic growth to follow. The empowerment of women is not only a social justice goal, it is treated as a direct source of collective economic capacity. This is a subtle but important difference from Midgley’s model, where economic development is built into the definition of social development itself, without specifying justice as its particular source.

Now, you should be able to list the core characteristics of DSW, explain why remedial casework alone is considered insufficient under this approach, explain the DSW rejection of modernisation’s account of the causes of poverty.