School Work Educational Institutions (SWEI) in Africa – Stats from IASSW Directory

The IASSW recently published its 2020 directory of SWEIs. The directory shows the Africa had 290 SWEI by 2020 although some might not be registered. Of all the regions, Africa still has the lowest number of SWEIs.

Global stats

There are 37 countries with SWEI in Africa, meaning 18 countries do not have social work training or have not been entered in the IASSW directory. Those not entered could be because of language barriers.

Top 15 countries in Africa by number of SWEIs

Top 15 countries by the number of SWEIs in Africa are as follows:

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF SWEI
Kenya (number 13 in the world)	51
Nigeria	49
Tanzania	21
South Africa	17
Egypt	16
Ghana	15
Ethiopia	14
Cameroon	11
Zambia	9
Libya	8
Somalia	8
Uganda	8
Malawi	7
Zimbabwe	7
Rwanda	6

It is time to transform SWEIs to social development educational institutions (SDEIs)

The number of SWEIs in Africa is growing but there are also development educational institutions (DEI) that could be competing with social work. The emergence of development institutions is an important development that should help move social interventions away from remedial approaches that are being driven by colonial social work in Africa. SWEIs should transform into social development educational institutions (SDEI) if they are to be more relevant to Africa. They also need to be working strongly with by having combined qualifications, collaborative research and fieldwork. Social work in Africa currently aligns more with sociology, psychology and anthropology but this is a western approach to social work. In Africa as in the rest of the developing economies, social work must align with development studies, political or governance studies, economic studies, cultural studies, environmental and agrarian studies.

The directory can be accessed here.