Afrocentric Social Work Practice Guidelines for Assisting African Clans Raising Children with Congenital Abnormalities

Abstract

The entanglement of African people with a system of westernised social work alien to their world view produces a paradigmatic and epistemic crisis. Consequently, African scholars are called upon to employ evidence-based methods to develop contextually rooted theories and models for African social work. Despite the outcry and numerous texts amplifying the need for decolonised social work typologies, there is still a scarcity of locally developed social work approaches or models. The lived experiences of African clans raising children with congenital abnormalities offer a window into the untapped yet rich world of African ways of being and knowing. This article presents Afrocentric social work practice guidelines for assisting African clans raising children with congenital abnormalities. Guided by the “Africana existential philosophy” and the intervention design and development model, the author used data generated from an original study of African clans’ lived experiences to develop a set of Afrocentric social work practice guidelines. The development of these empirically based practice guidelines for Afrocentric social work may encourage more efficient, effective and responsive social work practice with this population. It is also anticipated that the guidelines may further expand on a decolonised social work curriculum and help to formalise the resurgence of indigenous knowledge systems in social work research, practice and training. These guidelines do not exclude other theoretical options but rather complement them and provide an alternative perspective from the Global South.