Strength-based Social Work in South Africa

The point made by this article on social work in South Africa is extremely relevant for those offering psychosocial services in relief and development contexts.

The article highlights the need to "move away from a psychosocial and physiological focus on clients’ lives framed by a remedial model, towards expanding people’s capabilities and improving their socio-economic circumstances." Some authors think a strength-based approach, which "focuses on resilience to adversity, personal accomplishment and development through surmounting past difficulties, reinforcement of the expectations and aspirations held by people, and utilizing the assets, resources and knowledge of the individual, family, group and community," represents a "dramatic departure from conventional social work," which "operates on a deficit model which spotlights clients’ weaknesses and inabilities."

Also claims that: "The processes of colonialism followed by neo-colonialism in the guise of globalization," in which they include "conditionalities of IMF and World Bank lending under the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s," have "created and exacerbated many of the underlying constraints on African social and economic development."

It goes on to list coping strategies impoverished households use, and asserts that South African social workers rightly use "socio-economic rather than psycho-social interventions," which are "at a considerable remove from the dominant casework paradigm of Anglo–American social work:"

"The literature reveals that some of the most effective strategies are built around reciprocal exchanges of resources within communities, the pooling of community resources as a whole, the intricate domestic and economic collaboration of intergenerational households, and the diversification of livelihoods. Concomitantly, the interventions typically employed across Africa to address the problems of disadvantaged groups are those comprising micro-financing, short-term vocational training, functional literacy, school sponsorship, intermediate technology transfer and community-based approaches. The skills required for these activities include those associated with outreach and targeting, skills transfer, basic accounting, technical applications and community development, all within the rubric of multi-agency inputs and co-ordination. These bear only passing resemblance to the tasks and competencies of social workers in developed countries. Moreover, they comprise a skills base which marks a clear departure from the psycho-social assessments of remedial casework and the provision of welfare services.
The social and economic aspects of social problems are explicitly linked by African professionals through the deployment of such interventions as micro-financing, skills transfer and intermediate technology."

I take from this that when survival strategies are foremost, even psychosocial matters revolve around them, and so must psychosocial interventions.