African Journal of Social Work

Research grant writing tips and advice

Andre Renzaho — 2024-06-30

Writing a research grant proposal is a challenge. The biggest challenge relates to writing a grant without understanding the audience. There are two audiences one needs to have in mind when planning to write a grant. The first audience is the agency to which you plan to submit the grant application and the second audience is your own institution. You need to ensure that whatever research idea you plan to put forward not only fits the funding agency's research priorities but also that it aligns with your organisation’s research priorities. If you fail to articulate your grant application within these two parameters, then you know that it may not necessarily be competitive. Hence, you need to look back and try to understand whether you are aware of the funding agency's mission, research agenda, and guidelines, especially grant submission rules and inclusion and exclusion criteria. You do not want to waste your time putting a grant proposal and then realise at the last minute that you are not going to be eligible. In this paper I outline some of the tips to help you make your grant writing journey a rewarding exercise.

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Renzaho, A. M. N. (2024). Research grant writing tips and advice. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 108-119`. Grant writing workshop presentation delivered on 22 March 2022, organised by the African Social Work Development Network, East Africa Social Work Regional Centre and Association of Schools of Social Work in Africa. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.1

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The nexus between social norms and the Ubuntu and social work

Paul Bukuluki — 2024-06-30

What are norms? There are different schools of thought, but there is a general agreement that a norm is a behaviour shared by members of a given group, and this helps us to distinguish between a norm and an attitude. An attitude is something conceptualised at individual level. However, when you talk of a norm, it must be shared by a group. And when a norm is widely accepted within a much larger society, say, a whole region in Zimbabwe or a whole region in Malawi, that’s what you can say that it is a meta-norm because it is widely accepted by a much wider group of people. Social norms are influenced by belief systems and perceptions of what others expect and do. So, there is always this notion that what you believe others do is likely also to influence what you choose or decide to do – because you want to belong. So, you want to make sure that the way you behave, the decisions you make are aligned to your group, sometimes beyond your group, aligned group – the community or society where you live. However, social norms are also influenced by what you believe others approve or disapprove. So, you are likely to behave in a certain way or adopt a certain behaviour based on what you believe others you relate with approve or disapprove, or what you believe they consider appropriate or inappropriate. Adherence to these norms is also sustained by social sanction (rewards and punishments) from those people who matter in your life or context in which you live. These are referred to as reference groups. The strengths of social norms are in most cases determined by the severity of its social sanctions. Therefore, since Ubuntu is culturally constructed and displayed through processes of interaction, there is a high likelihood that it is influenced by social norms.

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Bukuluki, P. (2024). The nexus between social norms and the Ubuntu and social work. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 120-126. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.2

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Innovative fieldwork education in Africa

Rodreck Mupedziswa — 2024-06-30

My remarks focus essentially on the theme of social work education in Africa. I observe that social work education per se has two prongs – classroom instruction and field practicum. I then indicate that the paper is interested in the practicum component of social work education. It notes that in the context of Africa, there has been a clarion call for relevance in social work on the continent. To this end, terms like Ubuntu and indigenisation, have emerged in the context of the discourse on the quest for relevance of social work on the continent - concepts which are consistent with a developmental social work model. My argument is in order to successfully promote the development approach in social work, change has to begin in the education component. The challenge though is that some institutions of education and training in social work, have purported to be promoting the developmental social work education approach, when in fact, the practicum component of their education and training programmes is not consistent with the developmental approach. Apparently, some social work educators are not very clear in terms of what the developmental approach entails, while others are curtailed by institution culture and policies. I then argue that in order to produce a cadre who is well versed in the developmental social work approach, the fieldwork practicum component has to be consistent with the key tenets of the developmental approach. Six models of the developmental social work approach to fieldwork placements are presented as examples of the kind of field placements that would go with the developmental approach. Advantages of the developmental type of placements are briefly explored.

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Mupedziswa R. (2024). Africa Day Indaba 2022 – Innovative Fieldwork Education in Africa. presentation made during Africa Day Indaba 2022. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 126-132. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.3

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Social work's contribution to socio-economic development–why, how & who?

Noel Garikai Muridzo — 2024-06-30

Real development should be seen as more than just economic growth. Social Workers have important roles in the development of Africa. Mupedziswa, Sewpaul, Lombard, and others have put forward developmental social work as an approach that addresses issues affecting people at the macro level, nipping underdevelopment causal factors in the bud. Developmental social work abandons the reactionary and residual approach to problems. To celebrate Africa Day, the Africa Social Work and Development Network holds annual indabas where social work scholars and practitioners make presentations and discuss identified themes. Answering the questions why, how & why, this article presents one of the presentations delivered at Africa Day Indaba on 25 May 2023 and the ensuing discussion on social work's contribution to the socio-economic development of Africa. The presentation adopted a developmental social work lens

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Muridzo N. G. (2024). Social work's contribution to socio-economic development - why, how & who? African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 133-139. Presentation delivered at Africa Day Indaba, 25 May 2023. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.4.

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Promoting mental well-being and resilience among older adults and their caregivers in Africa: Challenges and the way forward

Uzoma Odera Okoye — 2024-06-30

And so, today, we're going to be looking at promoting mental well-being and resilience among older adults and their caregivers. We're going to address, you know, seven basic issues. We're going to try to define the concepts. We'll try to look at key issues about older adults and their caregivers. People will go, why caregiving? Why am I bringing in caregiving? Because that is what we know in Africa. It is what we do. That is how we take care of older adults. We give care. Then we'll also try to answer the question, why address mental well-being and resilience at this time? Why? Then we'll look at the problems. What are the problems that now impact on older adults that can bring about mental health issues? Then after that, we're going to look at the common mental health issues older adults have. How do we talk about them? Then we'll look at the strategies. We cannot just talk about challenges, barriers. What can we do? Because today you find that we can no longer call on government or call on people. We need to start doing something ourselves. Then we will conclude that is basically what we are, the business we have today. And so, we're going to start with defining some of the key terms. And we're going to look at older adults in this presentation, at persons who are 65 years and above. Persons who are 65 years and above in this presentation, we're going to regard as older adults. Then who are caregivers? Caregivers are individuals who provide paid or unpaid or informal care to older adults. Not all caregivers are paid. Many of them today are paid to provide care to older adults, while some are family members. So, these are the people we are going to talk about, the caregivers. Then when we talk about mental well-being, what do we mean by mental well-being? By mental well-being, we mean a combination of emotions, of all those issues that could make an older adult not to function very well or could make the caregiver not to function very well, not to have life satisfaction. That is what we mean. Issues that can affect their relationship, that can affect how they function in their day-to-day living. That's what we are going to mean whenever we talk about mental well-being in this presentation, just note that that is what we are talking about. Then we look at resilience. Here we're going to see resilience as the process or the outcome by which older adults and their caregivers successfully adapt to challenging life experiences.

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Okoye U. O. (2024). Promoting mental well-being and resilience among older adults and their caregivers in Africa: Challenges and the way forward. Presentation during Wazee Day (Older Persons Day), 6 October 2023. African Journal of Social Work, 14(2), 140-148. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.5

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Tree of Life Model and other Africa-centred interventions

Ncazelo Ncube Mlilo — 2024-06-30

The Tree of Life is a four-part process which involves drawing trees and then there is a second part of the methodology which is about the Forest of Life. So, Tree of Life begins with inviting people to draw their tree. And each part of the tree represents something specific about their lives, their roots, where they come from, their history, their heritage, their ancestry, the ground where they live, who they live with, what they like to do when they’re at home, favourite places, favourite songs or dances. The trunk – the skills and their knowledges, the things they’re good at, the things that people tell them they’re good at. The leaves of their tree – most important people in their lives, people who care for them and support them. And then the branches – your hopes, your dreams for both the near and the distant future. And then the fruits are the gifts that you’ve received and that you’ve been given. And so, people are invited to come up with a tree and then they are supported to tell stories around these aspects of their lives by somebody who has been trained, who knows how to help them to thicken their stories, because we want people to stand firmly in the second stories of their lives and the alternative stories – the stories about your hopes, your dreams, your skills, the people that are important to you, your aspirations in your life.

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Ncube-Mlilo N. (2024). Tree of Life Model and other Africa-centred interventions. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 149-154. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.6

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Human, social & economic capital development in Africa

Shahana Rasool — 2024-06-30

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.

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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

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Relational ontologies and epistemologies that are informed by our philosophies: Inaugural Ubuntu Annual Lecture 2022

Bagele Chilisa — 2024-06-30

It’s always a pleasure, a privilege, and an honour to share my thoughts with other African scholars. So, today I chose to talk about decolonising research and evaluation methodologies. I’ll start off with my understanding of what social workers do, then talk about the challenges that are there for social workers and others as evaluators and researchers. And then I introduce the decolonising paradigms and present the opportunities that are there for us as African scholars to work together to further our vision of an Africa that is liberated from only hearing from the global north. I understand that as social worker, you provide help and support to children and others in need, and that in doing so, you are informed by research. I understand that social workers are also evaluators, and they evaluate interventions to inform policy revisions and even modification of their interventions. I understand that social workers, they do research on social problems to inform design and evaluation of the interventions they design for efficacy. According to the SDGs, social workers have a responsibility, and this responsibility includes making sure that the interventions that they design are sustainable, that they provide long-term solutions for the wellbeing of the entire ecosystem that includes human beings and nature. I understand that social workers are also guided by the principles of social justice, human rights, and holistic and sustainable development to reach freedom and wellbeing. And I understand that social workers are expected to use various theories that take into account historical, cultural, and environmental underpinnings of society. Now, there are challenges with evaluation if you are a social worker. And the biggest challenge that we have today is that the paradigms that we use, the world views that we use that inform how we do evaluation have been informed by the ways of knowing of the West, the ways of seeing reality of the West, and the value systems of the West, and are also driven by Euro-Western methodologies. This has resulted in stagnation of thinking about other ways of doing evaluation and other ways of doing research. The biggest problem is that Western researchers and evaluators and the funders and donors from the West are reluctant also, because remember, most of our development interventions are funded from the West. These people are reluctant to engage with philosophies that see a connection between the living and the non-living. And these are called relational ontologies and epistemologies that are basically informed by our philosophies, especially the philosophy of Ubuntu.

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Chilisa, B. (2024). Relational ontologies and epistemologies that are informed by our philosophies: Inaugural Ubuntu Annual Lecture 2022. Ubuntu Lecture delivered on 25 November 2022. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 158-165. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.8

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Using Ubuntu-Bulamu in research

Johnnie Wycliffe Frank Muwanga-Zake — 2024-08-11

There are questions about using Ubuntu-Bulamu in research. I’ve been fortunate to publish a paper on bridging between Ubuntu and Western paradigms in research, and I went into that quite deeply. However, I want to advise those for students that in your research, it is not a question of choosing Ubuntu-Bulamu. I think it is a question of validity. When you do research, you must use methodologies, philosophies, and whatever, which are valid for that context. I heard this when I was at Rhodes University in South Africa, and I remember having had to actually argue with my supervisor there at Grahamstown. When I went out to investigate the adoption of ICTs in South African schools, and I discovered that the Western-based paradigms were not applicable because the people we are dealing with were Bantu people whose interrogation of what you are trying to research happens away from you. It happens in their communities. You give them questionnaires. They’ll carry those questionnaires back to their communities, engage with their chiefs, with their friends, with sometimes even in pubs. So, you are absent from the actual research that you need, the responses that you need. So, you have to be part of them. I said if I am to get valid responses, I have to go to those pubs. I have to go to those communities, sit with the chiefs, get their view of what we are trying to do, and that they cannot share unless you are a part of them, unless you are Ubuntu. So, contextually, I had to use Ubuntu as a philosophy, and I’ve written quite a bit about it. The only thing I wanted to point out here, the choice of using Ubuntu is not just a choice. It is a requirement of validity when you are working within Bantu communities. That’s the way I see it. Anyway, go onto this. As you can see, and it happens quite often, you come – you start with one idea and then you find that what you are trying to write about is not actually the title you give out. We changed titles. So, I ended up with Salvaging African Sustainable Development through Ubuntu-Bulamu, and of course, Ubuntu-Bulamu is the version of Ubuntu or Obuntu in my country here in Uganda [where I am] which is Ubuntu-Bulamu in South Africa. So, the idea I have here is really that our development sustainably is linked with our Indigenous Knowledge System with our environment and community, wherein I mean communities beyond human beings because it includes animals and plants and everything that is around us. And it is also linked with our ability to secure our environment and adding value to our resources using our own values, because again, what we have seen is the values added appeal to the foreigners most of the time.

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Muwanga-Zake, J. W. F. (2024). Using Ubuntu-Bulamu in research. Inaugural Ubuntu Lecture delivered on 25 November 2022. African Journal of Social Work, 14(3), 166-173. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.9

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