Prospects and Pitfalls Experienced by Social Workers Working in a Confounding Environment in a South African Setting

Abstract

While social workers are professionally and aptly placed to facilitate a turn-around environment rife with a conglomeration of challenges such as poverty, ignorance, and diseases, the chapter discusses the developmental prospects and pitfalls that confound their practice in South Africa. Opportunely, social work interventions continue to gain developmental mileage through increased training of social workers, their increased deployment in various versatile domains of social and economic development and increased widening of the scope of social work research, especially current research in fields such as HIV/AIDS and coronavirus. On the other side of the coin, the chapter discusses social work pitfalls attributed to professional curricular gaps as social work continue to follow a western-centric curriculum; the presence of various metaphysical beliefs and myths that weaken or derail social work interventions and a weaker research environment to offer a plausible and timely solution to the prevalent problems. The chapter concludes by calling for a paradigm shift in the social work curriculum as well as its indigenization to productively respond to the South African socio-cultural and geographical milieu.