BJSW Advance Access originally published online on September 20, 2006
British Journal of Social Work 2008 38(1):135-151; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcl087
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Social Work Practice to Support Survival Strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa
Dr. Siobhan E. Laird qualified as a social worker in 1994 with a background in mental health and child protection. She was employed for several years in a community care team in Belfast. Dr. Laird moved to Ghana in 1997 where she lived for four years and worked as the Co-ordinator of Social Work at the University of Ghana. She is presently a lecturer in Social Work at the University of Sheffield.
Correspondence to Dr. Siobhan E. Laird, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield S10 2TU, South Yorkshire. E-mail: s.laird{at}sheffield.ac.uk
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Summary |
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 Top Summary IntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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The high levels of absolute poverty, malnutrition and illiteracy across the sub-Saharan region require African social workers to develop new methods of intervention which differ from those used in Western countries. Identifying, augmenting and enhancing the strengths of disadvantaged people lie at the core of all social work practice. This paper adumbrates the range of survival strategies used by African households and concludes that these require buttressing through alternative approaches to orthodox social work methods.
Keywords: social work, Africa, coping strategies, survival strategies, social development
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Introduction |
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TopSummaryIntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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Social work theory and practice are dominated by an Anglo-American remedial casework model which is particularly problematic for social workers in sub-Saharan Africa (Midgley, 1981). Social organization, cultural practices and socio-economic conditions are profoundly different between African societies and those of Britain and America. As a result, the coping strategies deployed by vulnerable and disadvantaged groups across the sub-Saharan region are greatly dissimilar from those common in Western countries. Payne (2005), in his comprehensive overview of social work theory, demonstrates that social work approaches invariably focus on identifying and enhancing client strengths and buttressing their coping strategies. The major theories underpinning social work practice—task-centred casework (Reid and Epstein, 1972; Doel and Marsh, 1992), crisis intervention (Golan, 1978; Roberts, 1991), systems theory (Pincus and Minahan, 1973; Goldstein, 1973) and empowerment models (Mullender and Ward, 1991; Rees, 1991)—all share a fundamental commitment to mobilizing and enhancing client strengths, skills and competences. Aside from these approaches, all of which have been conceptualized within the USA or the UK, more recently, the social development model has been advanced for professional practice in developing countries (Midgley, 1995). The social development approach focuses on building individual capacity, but frames this within a community context and targets intervention on wider processes of social and economic development.
This article is based on a literature review of the principal survival and coping strategies adopted by communities and households in the sub-Saharan region. It also uses a web-based search to illustrate the range of interventions which are being implemented by governmental and non-governmental organizations to support these survival strategies. It is recognized that there is a great diversity in social organization and cultural practices across sub-Saharan Africa. However, survival strategies associated with the mutual aid of social networks, intergenerational households and multiple livelihoods are found in societies throughout the region (Chambers and Conway, 1992; Davies, 1996; Moser and Holland, 1997). Understanding the manner in which these arrangements protect well-being and identifying how they can be supplemented by social workers and community development professionals are crucial to elaborating upon the social development model of practice in the sub-Saharan region.
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An African critique of social work practice |
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TopSummaryIntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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For decades, African scholars have argued vociferously that social work theory and practice, which are essentially the productions of Western industrialized countries, fail to address the realities of daily life in the sub-Saharan region (Shawky, 1972; Osei-Hwedie, 1990; Silavwe, 1995; Gray and Wint, 1998; Gray, 2002). The grounds of their contestation are that the predominant Anglo-American psychosocial remedial casework model does not fit the cultural or socio-economic circumstances which characterize most lives in sub-Saharan Africa. As Shawky (1972) observed more than thirty years ago, the monopoly on English-language texts exercised by British and American academics makes it exceptionally difficult for African educators to discern or articulate an authentic perspective founded on their own practice experience and reflexiveness. The setting up of Departments of Social Welfare in African countries by the British colonial administration during the first half of the twentieth century has also contributed to the pervasiveness of British organizational structures and social work approaches to welfare (Midgley, 1981; Yimam, 1990; Iliffe, 1992).
Exceptionally, in South Africa, the White Paper for Social Welfare (Ministry for Welfare and Population Development, 1997) heralded an authentic departure from Anglo-American practice orthodoxies. Its preamble states that the intention behind the new policy was to ‘devise appropriate and integrated strategies to address the alienation and the economic and social marginalization of vast sectors of the population who are living in poverty, are vulnerable, and have special needs’. This was to be achieved through the adoption of ‘developmental social welfare policies and programmes’. While reference is made throughout the White Paper to ‘developmental social welfare’ and ‘social development’, nowhere are the organizational structures or programmes to support these new approaches spelt out. Instead, these were to be detailed and implemented through a five-year plan of action undertaken by the Department of Welfare at national and regional level (para. 19). However, the White Paper did list the kinds of interventions which were to be carried out by a reformed Department of Welfare. These were to include initiatives to reduce poverty, increase literacy, provide access to credit, offer training in employable skills, strengthen social networks, reduce malnutrition and improve household food security (para. 21). Notwithstanding these aspirations, full implementation of the White Paper is being stalled by two factors. First, professional wrangling over the place of community development within the social work curriculum and the necessity of producing new standards for practice have detrimentally affected the training of a workforce specialized in social development approaches (Gray, 2000; Mazibuko and Gray, 2004; Sewpaul and Lombard, 2004). Second, the South African economy actually shrank over the initial period of planned implementation of the White Paper and, by 2002, GDP per capital only stood at $2,600 (compared with $35,060 for the USA) (World Bank, 2004, p. 253). Inevitably, this has reduced the public finance available for introducing welfare reform under the White Paper. Thus, despite this seminal advance, there remains relatively little elaboration of theory and practice in relation to social work in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Focusing on people’s strengths and capabilities |
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TopSummaryIntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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The lack of specification for a developmental model of practice, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, necessitates further conceptualization around the nature of developmental social work. The basic tenet of the developmental approach is 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. The incorporation of a strengths perspective is, therefore, a crucial component of developmental social work. Although the major theories and practice approaches underpinning social work as collated by Payne (2005) refer to the importance of assessing client strengths, Saleebey (1997) argues that in actuality, social work operates on a deficit model which spotlights clients’ weaknesses and inabilities. He asserts that ‘many of these calls to attend to the capacities and competencies of clients are little more than professional cant . . . the strengths perspective is a dramatic departure from conventional social work practice’ (Saleebey, 1997, p. 3).
Tracing the history of theory building, both Saleebey (1997) and Weick and Chamberlain (1997) contend that the adoption of psychodynamic theories and the widespread use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, produced by the American Psychiatric Association, have heavily influenced social work across practice approaches. As a consequence, argues Saleebey (1997, p. 5), ‘social work has constructed much of its theory and practice around the supposition that clients become clients because they have deficits, problems, pathologies, and diseases; they are, in some essential way, flawed or weak’. As an alternative, Saleebey (1997) proposes a strengths perspective 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. Such a re-conceptualization of the social work task, which places emphases on increasing the capabilities of individual and community, rather than the need for remedial change by the client, fits comfortably within the social development paradigm.
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Conditions in sub-Saharan Africa |
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TopSummaryIntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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The breadth of difference in living conditions between the populace of a developed country such as the UK and the low-income nations of Africa is plainly evident in metrics collated by the UNDP and World Bank, as sampled in Table 1.
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Soaring levels of infant mortality, malnutrition, illiteracy and conditions of absolute poverty prevail for large sections of African populations. In Ghana, the unembellished metrics of the World Development Report translate into one in every ten children dying before the age of five years; in Zambia, it is almost one in five. Malnutrition affects from between one-third to a half of all children in just about any given sub-Saharan country. This is exacerbated and sustained by lack of access to clean water, particularly among rural communities. The subordinate position of women in the economic, social and political spheres is most starkly evidenced in the consistently lower literacy rates for females across the continent, while the high incidence of absolute (not relative) poverty testifies to the gross difficulty for many Africans in overcoming such grim conditions.
While, on one side of the equation, there are these dire statistics, on the other, there are weak and impoverished state sectors reliant on overseas development aid (Grindle, 1997) and, on occasion, further impaired by widespread corruption (Transparency International, 2004). The ability of African states to redress the needs of their populations has been further curtailed by the introduction of charges for education and health imposed by the conditionalities of IMF and World Bank lending under the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s (Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999). As a consequence, the social welfare departments identified by Yimam (1990) and Iliffe (1992) as existing in most sub-Saharan nations are unable to offer anywhere near the level of services and social work support provided by governments in a Western country such as the USA or the UK.
The processes of colonialism followed by neo-colonialism in the guise of globalization have both created and exacerbated many of the underlying constraints on African social and economic development. In the first instance, colonial administrations impaired human capital formation and the construction of physical infrastructure by concentrating on extractive industries. Consequently, at independence, many African countries were left with high illiteracy rates, poor infrastructure and an economy dependent upon a few primary commodities whose prices were vulnerable to sharp falls in the international markets (Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999). The oil price shocks of the 1970s combined with civil wars across the sub-Saharan region, as the poly-ethnic nations resulting from European colonialism erupted into violence, aggravated already precarious social and economic conditions. At this point, many African countries turned to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, only to be burdened with conditions under Structural Adjustment Programmes which necessitated opening their economies to international competition, financial market liberalization, the phasing out of subsidies on agricultural inputs and the introduction of charging for education and health provision (Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999). Globalization, in terms of financial deregulation, unrestrained competition by powerful multinationals and more volatile commodity markets have devastated local African industries to the extent that some countries are now experiencing de-industrialization (Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999). In short, the asymmetrical relationship between the dominant powers of the Western world and the developing nations of the sub-Saharan region remains intact (Stiglitz, 2002).
Situated between circumstances of widespread deprivation, a skeletal malfunctioning welfare sector and the persistence of neo-colonial relations with developed countries, African social workers must realize their role and tasks. One aspect of this must be the incorporation of people’s strengths into intervention approaches. But the character of these strengths and how they are to be integrated will differ fundamentally from practice in developed nations. In Africa, this necessitates comprehension of the coping strategies which are customarily deployed by households in situations of acute and chronic need. Thereafter, practitioners in the sub-Saharan region will be forced to search around for new approaches to building up poor people’s resources, in addition to buttressing and extending their survival strategies. Much innovation has already been tried and tested in the field through small-scale projects managed by governmental and non-governmental organizations.
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An overview of survival strategies in Africa |
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TopSummaryIntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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Davies (1996, p. 238) understood coping strategies to be activities ‘reserved for periods of unusual stress, often resulting in food insecurity’. However, ‘these same activities become adaptive strategies when they are used in every year to fill the food gap left once production and exchange entitlements have failed to meet minimum food requirements’. Thus, Davies (1996, p. 238) continued, ‘coping strategies are not hermetically sealed from habitual activities . . . but rather are extensions or adaptations of such activities’. Reviewing the literaturem, Chambers and Conway (1992, pp. 15–16) distilled the essential approaches to coping, which are illustrated in Table 2.
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It is important to recognize that coping strategies tend to be sequenced from the least disruptive to the most dramatic—those ultimately precipitating disintegration of the household. Blaikie et al. (1994, p. 69), drawing on evidence from their review of the literature, found that households begin by stinting to borrow from the Chambers and Conway (1992) taxonomy, substituting wild foods for staples. Claims are then made on others, most commonly kin. As Blaikie et al. (1994, p. 69) observed, this strategy ‘avoids usurious rates of interest, and therefore preserves the longer-term access position of the individual or household’. Simultaneously, the household will seek to diversify its portfolio of activity in an effort to tap new sources of income. Next in the sequence of coping strategies is depletion, with the disposal of assets, the lack of which will not undermine productive capacity, such as the sale of goats. However, should the household be confronted by severe food shortages over an extended period, then depletion will also involve the sale of vital productive assets such as agricultural tools and seed stock. In circumstances in which all these stratagems fail to arrest critical food shortages, which then become chronic, the household moves, migrating either together or individually in search of viable livelihoods or, in the most straitened circumstances, food aid.
The absence of a welfare state, in conjunction with pervasive absolute poverty and thus deficits in basic needs, has led many communities across the sub-Saharan region to both depend upon traditional coping strategies for survival and develop additional adaptations in support of activity to improve living standards. But it has to be borne in mind, as Chambers (1983) observed, in relation to rural development, poor farmers in developing countries live at or below subsistence levels and are therefore unable to take risks with new techniques where these may jeopardize already tenuous means of meeting survival needs. Likewise, social work interventions must complement existing adaptive coping strategies rather than endanger these with clashing stratagems. This is the position assumed by Davies (1996, p. 46) in relation to food security when she argues that ‘indigenous coping strategies’ should be ‘reinforced in preference to imposing external, often late, inappropriate and, above all, unsustainable solutions, epitomized by emergency food aid distributions’. The question then arises as to what are the coping strategies actually deployed by households and communities? How do agencies in Africa incorporate these strategies into their interventions?
Social networks
In a seminal work on the ‘moral economy’, Scott (1976) explored what he termed ‘the moral economy of the peasant’. Scott (1976) examined two interrelated characteristics of subsistence farmers—first, their modus operandi of risk-aversion rather than profit maximization and, second, the super-ordinate norm of reciprocity in economic transactions. It was argued by Scott (1976) that the necessity of distributing risks across households in subsistence communities in order to ensure that everyone could meet their survival needs was codified in normative mutual expectations of community members. Rain fed agriculture and limited technology or assets, combined with often harsh climatic conditions, exposed such societies to the risks of crop failure, debilitating disease, water shortages and natural disasters. In such a hazardous environment, social capital became the critical safety net for survival in adverse circumstances. Reciprocal exchanges of resources between households to mitigate the affects of, for example, low rainfall or illness became normative demands upon behaviour. Simultaneously, these demands constituted a form of social insurance and a liability, as assistance rendered created the obligation of reciprocation at a future time. Consequently, ‘the violation of these standards could be expected to provoke resentment and resistance—not only because needs were unmet, but because rights were violated’ (Scott, 1976, p. 6). The fundamental right is that of a right to subsistence, thus providing a claim of poorer households upon wealthier ones within the community.
While Scott’s study was of societies in Southeast Asia, he argued that his thesis applies to all ‘cultivators who share a common existential dilemma’ (Scott, 1976, p. 25)—in other words, any community in which there are ‘peasants with very low incomes, little land, large families, highly variable yields, and few outside opportunities’ (Scott, 1976). Davies (1996, pp. 36–7), in her study of rural livelihood systems in Mali, acknowledged the importance of the moral economy in redistributing assets within kinship groups. Similarly, Moser and Holland (1997, pp. 11–12), in their study of Chawama (a district in Lusaka, Zambia), found that social capital in the form of reciprocal transfers in cash and kind within urban and rural-urban networks constituted crucial mechanisms for coping with family crisis and household poverty. Finding that reciprocity also constitutes a material debt, Moser and Holland (1997, p. 12) discovered that as households in Chawama experienced increasing levels of poverty, they ceased to call upon social capital, such as borrowing money from neighbours, as they found themselves unable to repay the loans so incurred.
Plan International (2002)—an international non-governmental organization, working in a number of African countries—has recognized and incorporated these social dynamics into agency responses. Implementation of its welfare programmes is dependent upon the participation and material contribution of rural communities alongside the willingness of community members to manage and sustain the agency’s original input. At mass meetings of villagers, households are asked to donate sand, stone and their labour for the construction of a school or public latrines. In this instance, more prosperous households will normally be obliged to make the larger contribution in kind. Once structures are put in place, designated community members continue to oversee their proper use and maintenance. This approach to welfare provision builds upon the reciprocal relationships already extant in a community and draws on obligations between separate households. By requesting from the whole community specific contributions for the construction of public facilities and then making up the deficit, Plan International by-passes the intractable difficulties of service provision by an impecunious state welfare sector. It also spreads risk across households, with no single family having to invest resources disproportionately to acquire crucial amenities.
Mutual aid groups
Faith-based groups founded on mutual support are commonplace among African communities and provide indispensable material and monetary assistance to their members in times of difficulty. Mutual aid groups may make regular payments into a common fund which can then be drawn upon by affiliates confronted by adversity. Group members frequently provide one another with material assistance and moral support in such circumstances. Some communities have developed informal schemes for saving money which by-pass financial institutions that are often averse to dealing with the small amounts of money which can be set aside by those in the lowest-income groups. For example, in Ghana, susu (known as esusu in Nigeria) is a non-interest-accruing method of saving money. A sum is given periodically to a susu collector who undertakes to return the accumulated monies on request. In some instances, this has been adapted to cater for specific costs such as hospital treatment (Anie et al., 2001).
In Ghana, the Department of Community Development (2002) utilizes such mutual aid arrangements. Its fieldworkers use existing groups or assist the formation of new ones and then teach income-generating skills in order that members can make and sell produce, such as snack food. Reflecting indigenous savings schemes such as susu, Care (2004), which works across the sub-Saharan region, assists the formation of groups which are given training, through a number of weekly sessions, on how to create their own micro-credit scheme through regular savings and the planned charging of interest on phased withdrawals.
Intergenerational households
Moser and Holland (1997, p. 8) found ‘that households are important adaptive institutions for the poor, providing mechanisms for pooling income and other resources and for sharing consumption. In times of economic difficulty, households act as safety nets’. Commonly, extended families reduce living costs by eating from the same pot, to use an African colloquialism. Thus, living costs are invariably reduced as residents share expenditures for utilities and food (Moser and Holland, 1997, p. 10). Furthermore, lineage members tend to share the same accommodation in multigenerational groupings, typified by the compound house, which configures basic organization in many African societies. Within such social arrangements, collecting fuel and wood, processing food, cooking, childcare and operating small-scale commercial enterprises are shared activities, resulting in efficient complementarities of time and labour. With several generations of an extended family living in the same dwelling, domestic and economic tasks are usually mapped to the roles, often ascribed, of different age groups within the household. This is particularly accentuated around female petty trading activities, with older female family members engaging in doorstep trading, thus providing supervision of small children while their daughters and granddaughters are freed to conduct business outside of the home. Similarly, young children may provide ancillary services to older household members such as carrying produce in order to facilitate the trading activities of their mothers and grandmothers (Koomson et al., 1996).
Jiggins (1986, p. 12) and Moser and Holland (1997, p. 8) refer to the manipulation of household size and organization as a coping strategy. Since the household is both a productive and reproductive unit, which shares resources and mobilizes the labour of both adults and children to perform inter-dependent economic activities, household size can be manipulated to reduce its exposure to hazard and external shocks. Given the traditional practice of utilizing children’s domestic and agricultural labour, the addition of further minors to a household does not necessarily increase its dependency ratio—that is the number of dependents to productive members—and may well boost the earnings it can obtain from an improved portfolio of economic activities. This partly explains the high fertility rates which are observable across Africa. World Bank (2001, p. 286) figures show that these range between 4.2 in Botswana up to 6.7 for Angola.
An overview of child labour in developing countries by Bequele and Boyden (1995) concludes that children’s labour is a function of poverty. Ghazi and Simmons (1985) also cite poverty as having a positive correlation with household fertility. Although large families are regarded as essential to ensuring the availability of agricultural workers in subsistence economies, they can also result in increased poverty, as parents are unable to maintain their children in circumstances of extreme deprivation. Conversely, in times of acute deprivation, the household can decrease its dependency ratio by sending some of the children of the natal family to live in households of more prosperous relations. Kinship fostering is a widespread practice among African societies (Safilios-Rothschild, 1980; Lloyd and Desai, 1991). Both of these strategies, while assisting to meet household survival needs, can have detrimental consequences for children. Those engaging in agricultural labour in rural areas or working on the streets as porters or hawkers in urban ones miss out on education and are locked into poverty. Long hours in poorly remunerated work without any health or safety standards also threaten the physical and mental well-being of working children (Bequele and Boyden, 1995). Likewise, traditional kinship fostering can often lead to children not receiving an education, as they simply end up contributing their labour to another livelihood system, albeit in the household of other family members. However, at times, they can be grossly disadvantaged relative to the natural children of the family, becoming little more than unpaid domestic servants (CAS and UNICEF, 1999, pp. 35–7).
The impact of HIV/AIDS on the African continent has made reliance on extended kinship structures less viable as a coping strategy than has been true in the past. Most particularly, for the nations of southern Africa, rates of HIV infection are extremely high, with around 40 per cent of Botswana’s population aged fifteen to forty-nine years affected, compared with 21 per cent in Namibia and 16 per cent in Zambia (UNDP, 2004, Table 8). For these countries, the reduction in life expectancy to as low as thirty-three years in Zambia and forty-one years in Namibia (UNDP, 2004, Table1), combined with high mortality rates among parents and children due to AIDS, has had a profound affect upon family structure alongside household coping mechanisms. The consequences, in Zambia, for example, are an estimated 0.65 million children orphaned by the HIV/AIDS-related deaths of their parents, which is predicted to rise to 1.7 million by 2010 (Deininger et al., 2005, p. 306). The decreasing numbers of people living into old age in the most affected countries, in conjunction with an epidemic that is likely to affect the whole kinship group, and not just one household in it, plainly reduces the feasibility of using the livelihood systems of multigenerational households and kinship fostering as effective coping strategies. Social work interventions therefore have to take account of the detrimental impact on children of labour and fostering in the context of family disintegration in those societies worst affected by HIV/AIDS.
Interventions which complement the social and economic dynamics of multigenerational households, while boosting adaptive survival strategies, have been developed by a number of non-governmental organizations. Notably, Plan International (2002) employs integrated activities which address the inter-dependencies embedded at household level. It supports education programmes which comprise a sponsorship package for school-aged children together with interventions to enhance the income-generating skills of their parents or guardians. So, although a child’s continuation in formal education creates an opportunity cost for the household in terms of economic activity, this is compensated for by the increase in parents’ earning power. Projects supported by Oxfam (2005a) encourage the formation of groups of parents who organize voluntary provision which free the older children of households, particularly girls, from traditional child-care responsibilities in order to attend school.
In those communities affected by HIV/AIDS, agencies such as the Centre for the Development of People (2002) (a non-governmental organization in Ghana) are training young people in peer-to-peer education on HIV/AIDS prevention and self-care. This approach operates outside of intact multigenerational family structures and, where parents have died, it facilitates young people to establish new social networks offering mutual support. The same agency also takes referrals of HIV+ patients from the local hospitals and assists those well enough to organize into small groups. These groups are then given training on small business ventures and basic accounting. While these initiatives utilize survival strategies based around notions of reciprocal obligations, they do not rest on coping mechanisms dependent upon traditional kinship structures.
Multiple livelihoods
Dependence upon subsistence farming confronts households with a precarious living, exposing them to adverse contingencies which Scott (1976, p. 225) argued makes them ‘risk-managers’ rather than ‘risk-takers’. Consequently, the economic activity of poorer people seeks to spread risk among many sources of income and sustenance rather than depending upon a single occupation. Francis (2000, p. 56) observed in her study of rural Africa that ‘diversified livelihoods may involve combining farming with wage labour, trading, selling services or producing commodities for sale. They also involve all the help, transfers, exchanges and information that people get access to through social networks’. Multiple livelihood systems therefore constitute a vital adaptive coping strategy providing a protective array of activity around fragile household economies. Furthermore, since such marginal livelihoods as subsistence farming, herding and petty trading in local produce are so exposed to the vagaries of the weather, seasonal stress and unreliable state services, this reiterates the necessity of occupational diversification. Davies (1996, p. 34) went so far as to assert that ‘diversification is at the root of food and livelihood-security strategies in the Sahel’.
Evidencing the centrality of livelihood diversification as a survival strategy, Liedholm et al. (1994, p. 177), in an overview of previous empirical studies, found that micro-enterprises accounted for between 30 and 50 per cent of household income for rural inhabitants on the continent. Reardon (1997), in a review of twenty-three case studies, found that this ranged as high as 77 per cent in Botswana and 93 per cent in Namibia. Equally, Dike (1992) found, in a study of urban dwellers in two Nigerian towns, that 60 per cent of entrepreneurs engaged in multiple income-earning activities including farming itself.
Building on household economic diversification in Ghana, the Department of Community Development (2002) concentrates its activity in peri-urban coastal settlements during the off-season for fishing. Many impoverished coastal communities are primarily dependent on fishing, which only has a limited season. Once households are no longer engaged in catching and smoking fish, fieldworkers move in to train groups of men and women in alternative income-generating activities which can be used to supplement household revenues until the next fishing season. The Centre for the Development of People (2002) requires those applying for its micro-credit facility to analyse household income and expenditure streams in order to identify which livelihood can most effectively be expanded to generate additional monies. These interventions build on traditional survival strategies without posing added economic risks to households just managing to meet their survival needs. Care (2004), Oxfam (2005b) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (2005) support livelihood diversification through integrated programmes of intermediate technology transfer, skills training in small-enterprise development and marketing, micro-credit and the introduction of more versatile crops and livestock which can be relied upon during the dry season.
Household assets
Moser and Holland (1997, p. 2) were concerned to identify not only the threats to the household, but also its ‘"resilience" in exploiting opportunities and in resisting or recovering from the negative effects of the changing environment’. They identified the means of resistance and recovery in the assets owned by the affected household or community. Indeed, Moser and Holland (1997) argue that there is an inverse correlation between vulnerability and asset ownership; asset-poor households are therefore the most vulnerable to hazards. As Moser and Holland (1997, p. 22) further observed, it is the inability of households to withstand shock ‘without irreversible damage to the productive capacity of their members and to their asset position’ which makes them vulnerable. In this context, resistance is dependent both upon the asset base and the ability of household members to ‘transform those assets into income, food, or other basic necessities effectively’ (Moser and Holland, 1997, p. 22).
Protecting the household’s productive assets and supporting families to increase the quantity and efficiency of their resources is particularly emphasized in food security interventions. Across the continent, it is estimated that post-harvest losses of crops range from between 10 and 50 per cent. Thamaga-Chitja et al. (2004), studying South African subsistence farmers, attributed high post-harvest losses principally to poor storage facilities which were vulnerable to attack by pests and the climate.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (2005) supports interventions across the sub-Saharan region which educate subsistence farmers on affordable storage design. World Bank-supported initiatives such as the Village Infrastructure Project in Ghana require collective action by households in a locality to secure funding for community food storage facilities. This combines public funding for physical infrastructure with mandatory private contributions in cash from the beneficiary community (International Development Association, 1997). In the same country, fieldworkers from the Department of Community Development (2002) conduct demonstrations in food preservation, such as jam-making, for women’s groups in many rural areas. These interventions plainly seek to build up a household’s provisions and to ensure their conservation over a protracted period of time. This offers the household protection against poor climatic conditions or natural disaster and the inevitable forced sale of productive assets to meet immediate survival needs.
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The implications for African social work practice |
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TopSummaryIntroductionAn African critique of...Focusing on people's strengths...Conditions in sub-Saharan AfricaAn overview of survival...The implications for African...References |
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The main problems identified by research and explicated by African scholars highlight socio-economic and not psycho-social causes of social problems in the sub-Saharan region. Survival strategies are commonly deployed by impoverished households to counteract the worst effects of deprivation and are the expression of vulnerable people’s strengths and competence. It is, therefore, essential that these are documented, acknowledged and integrated into professional activity. 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. These are also approaches which utilize a strengths perspective, for they focus on the potentials of individuals, households and communities using interventions which dovetail into existing indigenous strategies. However, a model of practice which draws upon a strengths perspective, in conjunction with socio-economic rather than psycho-social interventions, is at a considerable remove from the dominant casework paradigm of Anglo–American social work. It does, on the contrary, fit neatly within the new conceptualization of a social development practice model now gaining more attention (Payne, 2005, pp. 208–66).
The efforts by African social work scholars, educators and practitioners to define new ways of working which better address the socio-economic and cultural context in which they operate should be acknowledged and supported by international professional organizations. But the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) (2005a), which is ostensibly representative of the profession worldwide, arguably reflects a Western bias in its conception of the role and task of social workers. This is evident in the IFSW’s (2005b) ‘Definition of Social Work’, which delineates the values, theories and practices underpinning social work globally. Throughout, the document highlights psycho-social factors alongside theories of human development and behaviour. Apart from passing mention of poverty alleviation, virtually no attention is given to economic issues and the social development model. Despite the IFSW’s (2005a) assertion that its governing body has representatives from all the regions, including Africa, there is little evidence that the organization is integrating the developmental paradigm into its conceptualization of the roles and tasks of social workers. In these circumstances, it is necessary for African scholars and practitioners to collaborate closely with one another and to elaborate upon a model of practice which promises to be of more relevance to the socio-economic conditions of sub-Saharan Africa than any other established social work method. Without greater elaboration of the social development approach in practice, it is difficult to envisage how this can become an internationally accepted and respected alternative to remedial forms of practice.
The main problem for African scholars has been the difficulty and cost of travel relative to income within the sub-Saharan region. This has made it difficult either to achieve sustained collaboration across national boundaries or for a regional organization to prosper. Both are necessary conditions to realize the critical exchange of ideas and their consolidation into a coherent approach to intervention with families and communities. It may be that with the advent of the World Wide Web, those in the sub-Saharan region will be better positioned to develop south–south networks of professionals. Alongside this may be the possibility of reduced or free subscriptions to online journals instead of the prohibitively high costs for African universities of hard copy volumes. It is difficult to envision how an innovative African practice model can challenge dominant Western social work paradigms unless African educators and practitioners alike are prepared to give this some priority in their interactions with one another. While social workers in South Africa have taken the first concerted steps towards a complete overhaul of what it means to be an African social worker, we are still waiting for Africans elsewhere to wrest the debate from the exclusivity of American and European scholarship.
Accepted: July 1, 2006
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