Human, social & economic capital development in Africa

Abstract

Basically, we're trying to promote the interest of social work education in the African region. And really, this should be a decolonized African-centred education, as well as to provide, of course, opportunities for consultation, exchange of ideas, resources, and faculty and student exchanges. But we often don't have the funding for this because we also don't have enough membership. We'd also like to be a body for channelling resources to social work education institutions in the region. And a lot of this gets done through our alliance with IASSW, which I'll talk to about just now, because we're also concerned not just with inter-regional and regional, but also international cooperation in social work education. ASSWA is linked to the International Association of Schools of Social Work. And I'm talking about IASSW because our role as Africans in IASSW becomes very important. If we don't have membership and we don't have enough representation and action from African educators, our role gets minimised in IASSW. But IASSW offers a lot of opportunities and resources for Africa to do more inter-regional cooperation and work. So, just quickly, the vision of IA is to promote excellence in social work education, research and scholarship across the globe in pursuit of a more just and equitable world. Now, I sit on this board and my question is often, justice for who? An equitable world for who? Human rights for who? Because they were very quick to act on the Ukrainian situation, but maybe not as quick to react to other issues in the world, for example, Palestine and other issues in Africa. I'm not going to go through their mission. You can find this on their website. And so, you know, I guess what I'm trying to talk about is why do we need to be active in these organisations? You know, both ASWNET, ASSWA, IFSW, why is it important for us? And as I said earlier, since the time of ASWEA in the 1960s and even the conference held by the esteemed Nkrumah, scholars have been talking about decolonisation and Africanisation. HOW TO REFERENCE USING ASWDNET STYLE Rasool S. (2024). Human, social & economic capital development in Africa. Presentation made during Africa Day Indaba 2022. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 155-157. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.7 Visit journal website: https://ajsw.africasocialwork.net