Malawi

Roles of a professional body or association of social workers

• Creating a code of ethics relevant to Africa: To create a code of ethics guided by African values that have been used to provide social services since time immemorial.
• Societal recognition: make social work known in families and communities including what social work is in local language, the roles of social workers and how the complement not replace or compete with the roles of families and communities. Presently, in most African communities, social work is not understood and at times it is hated because of its focus on western ideas, knowledge, philosophy, theories, methods and literature.
• Creating a local definition of social work: to help social work being understood and appreciated. Definitions in local languages will be more useful.
• Creating relevance: making social work in Africa more developmental to enable it to respond to the social issues, challenges and problems on the continent. Social work has to respond to mass poverty in a developmental not remedial way.
• Professional recognition: To raise social work to the level of other professions, and to give social workers respect and recognition of their service.
• Professional regulation: Ensure that social workers follow ethical principles that make them accountable for any professional misconduct, breach of ethics or confidentiality.
• Professional standards: To oversee social worker’s performance, attitude towards families, communities, peers, profession and the society. This builds trust and ensures credibility of social work.
• Training monitoring: To monitor social work training and fieldwork.
• Produce literature: To research, write and publish relevant literature for social work training and fieldwork.
• Advocacy: To advocate for social justice and social services.
• Continuous training: To lead continuous professional development (CPD) of social workers and all people providing social services. This is important especially for social workers trained in the colonial period, those trained using colonial syllabus or those trained outside Africa.
• Supporting and empowering indigenous services: To support families and communities in their roles of providing social services and not disempower them.
• Trade unionism: Act as the trade union of social workers to represent their interests and labour rights as workers, entrepreneurs, volunteers and social innovators.
• Consumerism: protect families, communities and employers from poor services from social workers, receiving complaints and dealing with them.
• Collaboration with other associations: Work and collaborate with other professional bodies in the country, in the region, in Africa and globally.
• Policy work: Creating policies or alternative policies to advance social development and to scrutinize existing policies of the government.
• Recognising social workers: Celebrate social workers through national social work day, global social work day and providing awards to social workers, students, academics and social work organisations.
• Networking: providing opportunities for social workers to network, share experiences and listen to others through indaba, conference, webinar, newsletters, journals, websites, social media e.g. groups of Facebook or WhatsApp, dinner etc
• Decolonising: To decolonise social work to make it relevant to Africa communities, this work involves, among others
  • Using African philosophy, including values, ethics, theories, models etc
  • Using African ethics and removing colonial ethics
  • Using African literature and removing colonial literature
  • Using African academics and replacing non-African academics
  • Using a home grown syllabus, and replace colonial syllabus – in the process avoid brain drain
  • Using and valuing African methods, techniques and strategies of social work  and not non-African methods
  • Valuing African history of social work and Africans who have contributed to that history
  • Contributing African knowledge and methods to global social work and not just receiving global knowledge without scrutiny
  • To educate families, communities, organisations and government about how to remove colonial practices, methods, knowledge etc from the social work services that they provide
  • Generally, make African social work more developmental in approach so that the profession becomes relevant to our families, communities, organisations and government