Decolonising Social Work Education as a Catalyst for Africa’s Socio-Economic Renewal

The Imprint of a Colonial Profession

To understand why social work education in Africa must be fundamentally reimagined, one must first trace the profession back to its arrival on the continent. Social work was not introduced as a benevolent response to local suffering but as an administrative appendage of empire. As Osei-Hwedie (1993) documented, early training programmes across Anglophone and Francophone Africa were direct replicas of curricula from London, Paris, and Lisbon, designed explicitly to produce functionaries capable of managing urban migration, juvenile delinquency, and the social dislocations caused by colonial economic extraction. The goal was social control dressed in the language of welfare. Decades after political independence, this foundational architecture has proven stubbornly durable. Mupedziswa (2001) described the persistence of these borrowed models as “academic neo-colonialism,” a state in which African schools of social work continue to measure their prestige and legitimacy against Northern standards, textbooks, and accreditation criteria, often at the expense of local relevance.

This historical entanglement is not a passive inheritance; it actively warps professional identity. Students in Accra, Harare, or Kampala are still taught to regard theories born in the consulting rooms of Vienna or the settlement houses of Chicago as universal truths, while their own grandmothers’ community-based healing practices remain untheorized, dismissed as anecdotal tradition. The result is a profession that entered the continent to police African families and has, in its unreconstructed form, struggled to liberate them. Decolonisation, therefore, begins with a candid admission: a curriculum that originated as a tool of subjugation cannot, without radical transformation, become a tool of genuine human and economic development.

When Imported Tools Cannot Till Local Soil

The most damaging consequence of this intellectual reliance is the profound mismatch between what social workers are trained to do and what struggling communities actually need. Consider the nature of deprivation that defines daily life for the majority of Africa’s population: chronic structural unemployment that pushes millions into precarious informal survivalism, intergenerational poverty reproduced by unequal global trade regimes, the social devastation wrought by pandemics such as HIV and AIDS, forced displacement triggered by climate stress and violent conflict, and rapid, unplanned urbanisation that produces sprawling settlements without sanitation, tenure, or hope. These are not discrete personal troubles. They are collective, historical, and deeply political wounds.

Yet the dominant curricular model, as Sewpaul (2006) has powerfully argued, remains anchored to neoliberal, individually focused, and remedial paradigms that locate problems inside the person. Students are meticulously trained in psychodynamic diagnosis, cognitive behavioural techniques, and clinical casework models that seek to adjust the individual’s functioning rather than confront the structural drivers of misery. In a context where a woman’s depression is rooted in the brutal daily arithmetic of feeding her children on an informal trader’s earnings, a fifty-minute therapeutic hour that never speaks of land redistribution, global commodity chains, or exploitative market systems is, at best, an expensive distraction. Graduates emerge as competent technicians of bandaging, equipped to manage the casualties of a punishing economic order but never to challenge the machinery that systematically produces those casualties. Decolonisation is not a call to abandon therapeutic care; it is a refusal to reduce social work to therapy while the house is on fire.

Why Socio-Economic Realities Demand a Ruptured Curriculum

The case for decolonising social work education is, at its core, a case for economic survival and societal resilience. The profession cannot claim relevance if it persistently fails to equip practitioners with the analytical and practical tools to interrupt the reproduction of poverty. When a newly graduated social worker sits with a rural community displaced by a large-scale agribusiness concession, her training in individual family casework will offer little. What is needed instead is a professional who understands the political economy of land grabbing, who can facilitate community organising, who can link grassroots experience to advocacy for fair trade and labour policies, and who can deploy methods rooted in collective problem-solving.

African scholars have long articulated the outlines of such a transformed practice. Ntseane (2010) has critiqued the individualistic foundations of Northern social work and advanced collective, culturally embedded approaches to livelihood and well-being that resonate with African communal worldviews. Midgley’s (1995) conception of developmental social work, later elaborated in the African context by Mwansa (2010), explicitly ties social work interventions to economic empowerment, sustainable livelihoods, and social investment rather than residual charity. Decolonising the curriculum means moving this developmental and structural orientation from the elective periphery to the compulsory core. It means training students to read a national budget with the same analytical rigour that they bring to a psychosocial assessment, and to see seed cooperatives and informal savings groups as legitimate sites of social work practice alongside the counselling room.

Ubuntu as a Pillar of a Liberated Pedagogy

Central to this intellectual reclamation is the relocation of African epistemologies from the exotic footnote to the foundational text. The philosophy of Ubuntu, which Letseka (2000) has elucidated as an epistemology of radical interconnectedness—the understanding that a person becomes human only through other persons—offers an ethical and diagnostic lens entirely distinct from the possessive individualism that undergirds much Western social science. When a social worker in an informal settlement encounters a household on the brink of eviction, a purely rights-based, individualistic framework may prove limiting where housing, child care, sickness, and income are woven into a dense web of mutual obligation and communal navigation. An Ubuntu-informed assessment does not ask merely, “What deficits does this family possess?” but instead, “What human connections have been ruptured, and how can communal bonds be healed and mobilised to secure shelter, food, and dignity?” This shifts intervention from managing the symptoms of poverty to rebuilding the very social architectures that economic dispossession has eroded.

Beyond Ubuntu, a decolonised curriculum would centre the oral traditions, proverbs, rites of passage, and indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms that have sustained communities for centuries. Such knowledge is not romantic nostalgia; it is a living reservoir of context-specific technology for psychosocial care and community regulation. When social work students learn to facilitate restorative justice circles rooted in local custom rather than importing purely retributive or bureaucratic models, they equip themselves to address youth delinquency in ways that rebuild communal ties rather than fracture them further into state systems. Decolonisation, as Mbembe (2016) has clarified, does not mean rejecting all ideas from the global North; it means dethroning the Eurocentric canon from its false position of universality and opening the academy to a genuine, critical pluralism where African intellectual resources carry equal authority.

Equipping the Architect, Not the Ambulance Driver

The practical translation of this philosophical shift yields a profoundly different kind of graduate. A decolonised training produces a social worker who is not defined by her capacity to apply a standardised therapeutic protocol, but by her contextual competence, her political literacy, and her ability to move fluidly between the courthouse, the cooperative farm, the chief’s palace, and the community health post. She understands policy as a tool that can either entrench or dismantle inequality, and she has been trained to analyse budgets, facilitate community-led action research, and challenge discriminatory legislation alongside supporting a grieving family. This is not the abandonment of interpersonal skills but their integration into a broader armoury of structural intervention.

When a nation’s social development workforce is composed of such professionals, the cumulative impact on socio-economic challenges becomes tangible. Social workers become catalysts for micro-enterprise development within support groups of women living with HIV. They become advocates who link informal waste pickers to municipal recycling policies that recognise and protect their livelihoods. They become facilitators of participatory planning processes that ensure slum upgrading projects genuinely reflect residents’ priorities. Waldegrave (2005), writing from a context of post-colonial economic inequality in the Pacific, has demonstrated that when practitioners are trained to address both the personal pain and the economic policy that generates it, therapeutic and developmental outcomes are dramatically enhanced. In Africa, the imperative is even more acute, for the state often lacks the fiscal muscle to provide comprehensive welfare; the most powerful resources are the communal networks and local economies that a decolonised social worker is precisely trained to strengthen.

Conclusion

The decolonisation of social work education in African tertiary institutions is not an intellectual luxury for conference halls and academic journals. It is a frontline strategy for tackling the continent’s most intractable socio-economic ailments. To persist with curricula that produce practitioners who are clinically fluent in Northern diagnostic manuals but mute on the informal economy, land tenure, and the communal coping strategies of the poor is to wilfully misallocate the scarce resource of trained human capacity. Every year of delay produces another cohort of graduates dispatched into communities with instruments too blunt to cut the chains of structural injustice.

The scholars cited across this discussion do not speak in a single, homogenised voice, but they converge on an essential truth: knowledge production is never neutral, and the choice of what to teach is always a choice about what kind of society to build. Choosing to centre African realities, philosophies, and strategies of survival is an act of intellectual self-respect and developmental pragmatism. It is the professional equivalent of a nation that decides to stop exporting raw materials and cheaply importing processed goods, and instead invests in local value addition. The decolonised social work curriculum is a curriculum of local intellectual value addition, one that trusts African thought to solve African problems. The socio-economic liberation of our communities may well wait on no other single resource than the liberation of our training halls from the long shadow of colonial imitation.