The table below sets three accounts of social development side by side: the harambee social development model, rooted in Ubuntu and orature and organised around society as its starting point, the African Social Development approach associated with Kaseke, Mupedziswa and ASWEA, which named the historic neglect of the macro level in African social work, and Midgley’s social development model, formulated within Western academic scholarship yet crediting the developing world as the origin of the field. Placing them together makes clear where each stands on its own, where they overlap, and where the harambee model in particular offers something the other two do not yet supply, a fixed societal starting point, a five level Ubuntu based systems view, and an account of economic growth as flowing from economic justice and collective effort.
| Dimension | Harambee model of social development | African Social Development (ASD) approach (Kaseke, Mupedziswa, ASWEA) | Midgley’s social development model |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is unique to it | Originated in orature, transmitted through proverbs, praise poetry and communal performance, before being structured into an academic model; rooted in Ubuntu as one of its five core values, carrying a moral force, no one refuses to be part of what you are, society | Emerged from African social work scholarship and institutions, ASWEA in particular, as a direct critique of Western curricula and Western modernisation applied to African development, documenting the historic neglect of the macro level | Formulated directly within academic social welfare scholarship; provides a formal definition, planned social change promoting population wellbeing alongside economic development, and a generalised strategy applicable across countries and welfare systems |
| Starting point | Society itself is the starting point. Activity can happen at any level, individual and family, community, or society, but it only counts as harambee if its purpose is the benefit or development of society as a whole | Has no single fixed starting point of its own. It identifies the macro level as neglected and argues practice should shift toward it, but it does not set out a rule requiring every lower level activity to be judged against a societal purpose | Has no fixed starting point. Intervention strategies are designed to address the macro, meso and micro levels simultaneously, without requiring that lower level activity be justified by a societal purpose |
| View of systems | Uses an Ubuntu based systems view with five levels: 1. Individual and family (small and larger families), which could be the same as micro except that families include clan and tribe. 2. Community, which could be the same as meso. 3. Society, which could be the same as macro except that Indigenous leadership and laws are included here. 4. Environment, mega. 5. Spirit, meta | Uses the conventional micro, meso and macro levels inherited from Western social work, while arguing that African practice has wrongly concentrated on the first two and neglected the third | Uses a Western systems view with three levels: 1. Individual and family, micro. 2. Group, organisation or community, meso. 3. Whole of society or policy, macro. The model stops at the societal level, with no equivalent environmental or spiritual level |
| Relationship to economic growth | Economic growth is treated as flowing from economic justice and collective effort, such as land reform and the empowerment of women, meaning growth is a consequence of correcting structural unfairness rather than a separate input | Rejects the modernisation assumption that economic growth trickles down, and calls instead for structural policy that secures basic needs and social justice, but does not specify economic justice itself as the source that generates growth | Economic development is built directly into the definition, social development is defined as inseparable from a dynamic process of economic development, without specifying justice as its source |
| Origin story | An indigenous African value, discredited theories of foreign origin, such as the Hindu language myth, actively corrected and dismissed | An African scholarly and institutional response to colonial and Western dominated social work education, developed through ASWEA and scholars such as Kaseke and Mupedziswa | An academic field whose author explicitly credited the developing world as its point of origin, later adopted by the West |
| Where the three models merge | All three reject the residual, case by case welfare model in favour of structural, whole of population change; all three insist that development must be planned, deliberate and society wide rather than incidental; harambee and the ASD approach both anchor this critique specifically in Africa, while Midgley extends it to the Global South more broadly, and Midgley credits the developing world, rather than the West, as social development’s true point of origin; together the three models support the same conclusion, that genuine social development requires macro level, integrated action rooted in the lived values of the society it serves |