Friday, August 29, 2014

Global Social Work: Botswana & Myanmar

A history of social work in Botswana – and the challenges ahead

IFSW, (2014). 

Kgomotso Jongman President of Botswana National Association of Social Workers explains the problems facing the profession. The BNASW is an active IFSW Member:

Social work in Botswana is a relatively new profession, established by the British government in 1946 to look after returning soldiers from the second world war. The profession has steadily grown from one social welfare officer who was based at the ministry of education to more than 3500 social workers.

In the past, prior to contact with colonists, welfare services were provided through the community, with households supporting each other in times of need. Poor members of the community were assisted by more affluent members, through systems such as mafisa – a scheme whereby people with lots of cattle loaned livestock to those who had none. The chief, the highest political authority, occasionally collected levies from his subjects to be used to sustain the community in times of famine and drought.

Social services such as education and health were rudimentary, and mainly provided through local initiatives. Indigenous volunteerism and mutual aid were the key ways through which services were provided.

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Social work in Myanmar: a slow and difficult birth

Ashencaen Crabtree, S. and Parker, J. (2014). Guardian Professional.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, has long been isolated to the international community, with solitude self-imposed by the leading military junta. But cracks are beginning to show, due to the lure of capitalism. Corporate business has been alerted to the possibility of big profits, in a work market where there is no minimum wage and a recent history of enforced labour.

During our research sabbatical as visiting professors at two elite Malaysian universities, University Sains Malaysia and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, we were invited to Myanmar. Our role was to offer free, much-needed social work training workshops via the Myanmar Education and Development for Social Work, a fledgling agency. We also held research seminars for community development master’s students at the Myanmar Institute of Theology in Yangon.

Myanmar was a sobering experience from the beginning. It is unnerving to find that immigration officials know exactly who you are before your name is announced or passport shown. While usually happy to chat cheerfully to taxi drivers in south-east Asia, we felt a certain disinclination to answering questions now. The feeling increased as, pulling up to our very ordinary hotel, we had to walk through a peculiar electronic portal that lit up and clanged alarms if anyone passed through or out of the hotel. Would it be necessary to hold private conversations in the bathroom with all the taps running, we wondered.

On our first session, we arrived at a crowded, make-shift classroom in a Christian community hall to find that of 45 trainees only five had any social work training at all. The rest had been made up from the Baptist Church congregation who worked in a variety of non-governmental organisations, service industries and other outlets.

All the carefully prepared training materials that we had brought were based on the assumption of rudimentary working knowledge of social work. Complete reassessment of the situation was suddenly needed. This seemed a blow at the time, as our preparations had been focused on the complexities of international social work values and ethics, and social work assessment training – not subjects that are particularly accessible if you have no social work background. Yet after all the trouble and expense of coming to Myanmar, it had to work out somehow – and thankfully it did.

As is so often the case, the teacher learns as much from the trainees as they impart. While our audience didn’t know much about social work they certainly knew a great deal about social need in Myanmar. Participants didn’t realise that something as seemingly humble as working with the lowly and underprivileged could be counted as a profession. The idea of international standards and principles underpinning this work was also a revelation.

Despite this, the social and ethical necessity of this kind of work was easily embraced and recognised. The appetite for information grew while inhibitions about taking part lessened, with participants able to talk and give opinions more freely. When social inquiry was seen as a legitimate part of professional work people unleashed themselves.

One tool we used were genograms – a picture representation of a person’s family connections and relationships. Participants developed these for famous families of their choice, and the assessment techniques involved in analysing these were quickly seen as useful for their own service work. Similarly, we carried out eco-mapping of the Aung San dynasty. This kind of mapping shows what systems operate and affect someone’s life.

In this story, the famous, ageing daughter follows in the footsteps of her equally famous but long-since assassinated father. The map helped those working on it to raise questions about troubling unknowns, both historical and contemporary. This appeared to be very liberating, and emotions grew as audience interest swelled in relation to issues, not always directly related to social work, but decidedly relevant to the traumatic, national context.

Our work over, we left Myanmar with goodwill, impressed by the intelligence of our participants. Now we wondered how and when we could return to witness the slow, difficult birth of a new indigenous social work model in this isolated and brutalised country.

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