The South African Experience

Maren Bak, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, Goteborg University, asks: ‘can developmental social welfare change an unfair world?

Is developmental social welfare pie in the sky when you die or a realistic way to enhance the well-being of the poor and disempowered?

South Africa after liberation in 1994 is one of very few countries in the world that is involved in a complete redesigning of its welfare system and has adopted the developmental perspective as the paramount official political goal for social welfare and social work.

After several years, it is worth studying the experiences and results in practical social work. Outcomes are important for social welfare and social work in both developing and developed countries.

The empirical cases of practical social work are based on the author’s field visits during November 2000 studying social programs and projects focusing on families, women and children. This choice was based on evidence from many countries of the vulnerable situation of children and of women who are single heads of households. Their situation is particularly dependent on state welfare policy (Bak, 1997).

The social development perspective
Poverty and large-scale unemployment are the biggest social problems in South Africa. At least half of the black population live in poverty. After the election in 1994 the ANC government was faced with the expectations of the millions of poor and destitute who had fought for freedom and voted ANC into power. They hoped for a fair and far-reaching welfare system, but the state, although defining itself as democratic and socialist, could not finance an institutional welfare state. The construction of the developmental social welfare policy was an answer to this dilemma.

The political program for the democratic government was formulated in ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (1994) and was elaborated specifically for social welfare in the White Paper for Social Welfare (draft 1995, final version Department of Welfare, 1997). The White Paper contains ‘principles, guidelines, recommendations, proposed policies, and programmes for developmental social welfare in South Africa’. The commitment found further support and inspiration in the works of the South Africa-born James Midgley, and the actual policy formulation was inspired by his concept of developmental social welfare as a part of social development.

Social development is the overall process of change. Midgley, who has written extensively on social development, social welfare and social work in an international perspective, defines social development as ‘a process of planned social change designed to promote the well-being of the population as a whole in conjunction with a dynamic process of economic development’ (Midgley, 1995). He develops this perspective as a contrast to distorted development, evident in many parts of the world, where economic development benefits a minority but leaves the majority of population in deep and unchanged poverty. {mospagebreak}

The basic idea in the social development perspective is to link the promotion of human welfare to economic development, thereby redefining the concept of development so that it becomes socially relevant. ‘Required are policies and programmes that enhance people’s welfare and at the same time contribute positively to economic development’ (Midgley, 1997: 11).

This perspective on social development was given international recognition in the UN World Summit on Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995. The White Paper makes explicit references to Midgley’s definitions of social development and to the World Summit. The opening chapter of the White Paper states that ‘Social development and economic development are two interdependent and mutually reinforcing processes’ (Department of Welfare, 1997: 10).

Developmental social welfare is one of the mechanisms to promote social development in the above sense. It is proclaimed in the White Paper as the national strategy in social welfare and defined in accordance with the UN definition as one of the dimensions in the process of social development.
In South Africa the definition of social welfare programs has a strong emphasis on human potential, equity and justice as a clear departure from apartheid’s racially divided programs supplemented with charity. It is stated that social welfare is an integrated and comprehensive system of services and programs to promote social development, social justice and the social functioning of the people (Department of Welfare, 1997: 15).

The first of the national goals for this strategy is ‘to facilitate the provision of appropriate developmental social welfare services to all South Africans. These services should include rehabilitative, preventive, developmental and protective services and facilities’ (Department of Welfare, 1997: 15). Thus there is apparently an ambiguity over whether all social welfare services should be understood as developmental or not. In the further description of the strategy the same ambiguity is apparent as the developmental perspective is unspecified. The developmental perspective, linking economic and social activity, reappears however in the ‘Agenda for Action’ where ‘efforts will be made to relate welfare policy more closely to changes and policy development in the labour market’ (p. 17) or in the ‘War on Poverty’ section: ‘Innovative strategies will be designed for vulnerable individuals and families to increase their capacity to earn a living through employment creation, skills development, access to credit and where possible through facilitating the transition from informal to formal employment’ (p. 18). {mospagebreak}

The responsibility for social welfare should be taken in partnership between government welfare and other relevant departments, the community, and organizations in civil society and in the private sector. In the description of social welfare programs the striving for equity in provisions is clear, but it is, however, not so clearly outlined how the specific developmental welfare perspective should be implemented and in which ways the developmental social welfare will be linked to the economic policy.

The role of developmental social work, according to the White Paper, is to implement developmental social welfare, but the outline of what this means is less clear in the document, and the role of social work is left ambiguous. It is envisaged that there will be a change from charity and individual casework to group and community work, thus stressing solidarity and human resources. Social work will not be carried out by just one profession, but by social development workers, by child protection workers and by social workers. Roles, responsibilities and education will be developed to meet the new needs. Developmental social work is understood as one of the possible contributors to social development, and the document states that the country needs social development rather than social work to deal with the paramount problem of poverty.

From charity to solidarity in South Africa’s social work
This attempt to transform social welfare and social work from charity to solidarity in South Africa after liberation should, I think, be analyzed in the historical context of experiences in community work as part of the liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s. This inheritance of grassroots empowerment, however, is disregarded in many articles on South Africa’s social work; for instance, Van Eeden et al. (2000) do not mention this issue in their comprehensive analysis of the development of welfare in South Africa before and after apartheid.

Black community programs were first put on the national freedom agenda in 1972, deeply inspired and fuelled by Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and influenced by the works of Paolo Freire and Saul Alinsky on consciousness raising and community development. Radical students, social workers and communities themselves worked cooperatively to expand social work into community work. Community workers had to reach out to oppressed communities and work within them, relying on and creating and strengthening the powers of civil society for survival and for resistance to oppression (Gunnarsen, 2001). {mospagebreak}

In research on community work for development and change from the period of the struggle for freedom, three paths were identified leading social workers from casework to community work. Two had to do with the costly and inefficient use of resources in individual work. The third was defined by the rejection of the pressure towards conformity and of the unequal power balance inherent in individualized social services (Van Harte and Lund, 1990; Gunnarsen, 2001). This wave of grassroots community work played a major role in the development, resistance and consciousness raising of the black and colored townships, which was an essential part of the democratic movement.

In the late 1980s, mainstream social workers also united for change, and at a historic meeting in Cape Town they rejected the racially divided social welfare system (Gray, 1996). The debate on necessary changes became open, and the advocacy for developmental models in social work grew strong in the whole South African region (Patel, 1987; Osei-Hwedie, 1990).
In 1995 Leila Patel, one of the community workers, now Director-General of the first South African

National Department of Welfare which replaced the earlier racially divided welfare departments, stated in an interview that ‘we are building consensus on the need for a switch to a developmental approach to social welfare and we are getting the commitment and support for such a direction’ (Lombard, 1996).

The experiences and ideas from the resistance years are recognizable in the ANC policy declaration for social welfare expressed in the White Paper. The White Paper principles of Ubuntu – caring for and helping each other – self-help and the responsibility of the local communities for their own development are in accordance with the grassroot experiences of empowerment.
The White Paper stresses that the government alone cannot and should not take responsibility for the eradication of poverty and the social welfare needs of citizens. Partnership between government, the community and organizations in civil society should be strengthened, and individual and community responsibility for welfare and development is fundamental. The White Paper denounces the personal deficiency model and focuses clearly on deficiencies in the societal system, which have to be remedied to allow humans to develop their potential. {mospagebreak}

The developmental social welfare policy was reinforced by the new ‘Financing policy for developmental social services’ (Department of Welfare, 1999a, 1999b), which can be interpreted as an attempt to take a firm step towards solidarity and equity and to finally put an end to the past welfare history of charity. The policy statement emphasized that the whole welfare sector has to show much more explicitly that it operates on principles of equity and within a developmental perspective, ‘to shift services from being predominantly reactive to more proactive; to shift the focus of services from a curative approach to a preventive approach’. This should take place over a five-year period.

In the vocabulary of the new financing plan the concept of social problems does not exist any more, only the need for different kinds of developmental services, where prevention should have priority.
The debate about the role of social work under the new developmental social welfare conditions has been intense in South Africa.

The whole restructuring is done without raising the funds allocated to social welfare. Of the welfare budget 90 percent is directed towards social security, such as old age pensions, disability pensions, and only 10 percent is used for welfare services and institutions. The NGOs carrying out the statutory work never receive from the government more than 60 percent of their finance. The social welfare community has begun to call attention to severe discrepancies between the Bill of Rights that ensures social welfare as a citizen’s right and the actual government provision of welfare.
The White Paper raised questions to the profession, and the government has continued its critical stance towards social work arguing that other professions could do a better developmental job. But the profession has questioned the responsibility of social work to implement the productivist social development model without clear commitments from the government on its role in providing new structures and economic means. The social work commitment to development is confirmed, as is also the need to clarify methods of implementation (Terblanche and Tshiwula, 1996; Gray, 1996).
Western influences in the theories and philosophies of social work have been debated as well as the need for indigenous social work (Osei-Hwedie, 1993). The content of social work education and its response to the developmental models, the role of schools of social work and the whole social work profession in a changing sociopolitical dispensation are also hotly discussed (Green, 1999; Gray and van Rooyen, 2000; Mamphiswana and Noyoo, 2000). The emphasis on social development and empowerment is a dilemma, because it may be contradictory to the need to protect the individual, and consider his/her needs for care and support (Jacques, 2000). {mospagebreak}

Empowerment perspective
In this analysis of social work in South Africa I will concentrate on social work and the empowerment of underprivileged groups which are crucial, given the historical context of fighting oppression and the present situation of inequality in South Africa. Therefore I will analyse the practical implementations using theories formulated in social contexts that are similar to South Africa in the sense that they also lack an institutional welfare system and suffer from major social inequalities.
The Cornell Empowerment Group has developed a model and definition of the empowerment process based on more than two decades of theoretical and practical work with family support in the US and in many other parts of the world. It was started by Moncrieff Cochran and Urie Bronfenbrenner as a research program to find ways to identify and emphasize family strengths in a community context. Influenced by thinkers such as Paolo Freire, and by ongoing research and analysis of successful empowerment processes which have helped people lacking in resources to get more access to and control over them, the group developed this definition of empowerment: ‘an intentional, dynamic, ongoing process centred in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources’ (Cochran, 1992).
The definition focuses on empowerment at the group level. Individual empowerment is a prerequisite in the process, but not the endpoint, as empowerment consists of the community-based process itself. The process is not steered by local or state government. It gets its energy from individuals and groups working together in the community.

Mutual respect is at the heart of the process, involving shifting power to people and groups who have experienced very little power over their own lives, and based on the assumption that all people have strengths that can be developed and that diversity in race, gender, age, etc., is positively valued in the empowerment process.

Critical reflection was stressed by Freire, for example; it involves the ongoing reflection among the group of daily life and the ways of development. ‘Groups take their own daily lives as objects of their reflection. They are required to stand at a distance from their daily lives in which they are generally immersed and to which they often attribute an aura of permanence. Only at a distance can they get a perspective that permits them to emerge from that daily routine and begin their own independent development.’ (Freire, 1978).

Group participation and caring for one another are part of the successful empowerment process and a condition for reaching goals and obtaining rights. The Cornell empowerment definition centres on an understanding of oppression and inequality as social realities and empowerment as a process that diminishes inequalities and helps the marginalized to access valued resources. {mospagebreak}

Social work: examples from practice
The case presented here is one of a multitude of developmental projects being carried out in South Africa, chosen because it focuses on families and children and is part of an important national NGO, The Child and Family Welfare Society. The example must be understood in the socioeconomic context in South Africa with its poverty and social inequality. Income distribution in South Africa is among the most unequal in the world; only Brazil has a higher level (as measured by the Gini coefficient), and there are indications that earning inequality in South Africa even increased in the years 1995-8 (Budlender, 2000). Of South Africa’s more than 40 million inhabitants about 77 percent are black, 11 percent white, 9 percent coloured and 3 percent Indian, but the blacks and coloured are the most poor. Among black households, 50-60 percent are poor or very poor compared to less than two percent among white households (Statistics South Africa, 2000). A national household survey of 1995 gives an idea of the stressful lives of black families, in which only 40 percent of black children were reported as living with both parents, 46 percent were living with the mother only and 13 percent were living without their parents. Many of the women who are lone heads of households and responsible for the upbringing and feeding of children belong to the poor and very poor.

The Child and Family Welfare Society has been active in South Africa since 1916 with local offices all over the country, and is one of the more than 10,000 NGOs responsible for a considerable part of social work and social services in South Africa. The Child and Family Welfare Society receives support from the government, based on applications, but has to raise considerable funds from other sources as well. The organization is responsible for child protection, child welfare and social work. The example here is of one local office, which serves an area with seven different communities and some 200,000 inhabitants. The staff consists of 13 social workers, one pre-school teacher and a few management and technical staff. The communities they serve are poor, mostly inhabited by black and coloured South Africans, and the problems are those of all poor South African communities: high unemployment, bad housing, lack of infrastructure and recreational facilities, problems in school, gangs and criminality. How is developmental social work understood and implemented in this context?

Since the early 1990s the office has tried to implement the new welfare policy, but social workers always felt the competition with the needs from individual casework. Following the new financing policy they had to decide for a much more definite mind change and practical change:
”The state actually forces everybody now to change, the work must be in a more developmental way and individual one-to-one work must absolutely be the lesser part. All of my 13 social workers were at the beginning of last year allocated to different communities doing both community and individual work. Since last year only six of them are doing individual work and the other seven only community work, one in each community. It is good to work integrated but the case work keeps you so busy and you get so involved that you are not getting into your communities, so we realised that to do this paradigm shift to move from individual to developmental work you have to make a change. We were forced into making an immediate change. To stop one day with the old way and start with the new way of doing things.” (Leader of the Child and Family Welfare Society). {mospagebreak}

The mind change and the new working methods in this NGO mean that the social worker works with other people in communities and institutions in a wide variety of developmental work. One of the social workers is working with the teachers in a black school to help them to adopt a strength-based education, to stop focusing on the children’s problems and to discover and develop the children’s capacities instead:

“We are actually very much focused on the schools in our community. We try to get involved. Some of our social workers are on a daily basis involved, they are doing life skills training, and we are trying to get the school staff involved,” (Leader of the Child and Family Welfare Society).
According to the interviews, the social workers are especially working to get the school staff involved in speaking about HIV and sexuality and in teaching the children how to say no to someone who wants to have sex with them, themes which are vitally important in Africa now.

“You have to make them (the teachers) comfortable – we go and sit down with them and suggest to them how to do it, we have to help them to put the programs in the schools,” (Social worker from the Child and Family Welfare Society).

Through the developmental perspective these social workers have actually found tools that are helpful to teachers.

“We feel responsible, we see the need because if the school will do something, then they will help us in the community, then we can work together,” (Social worker, Child and Family Welfare Society).
The role of social workers as support in the schools should also be understood in the specific context of the South African education system, which was based on racial divisions and apartheid ideology and where major efforts are just now being invested in reworking all curricula.

Another project of the Child and Family Welfare Society, which is part of the mind change program, is the ‘Eye on the Child’, which was first developed in Wynberg outside Cape Town. Child abuse, neglect, abandonment and sexual abuse of even very small children are alarming problems in South Africa, especially in poor and deprived areas. Social workers are overwhelmed and cannot protect the children on their own. A program was developed in cooperation between social workers from the Child and Family Welfare Society and the community, based on volunteers in the community who act as ‘Eyes’ that see children in distress and act to protect them (Doran, 1999). The ideas from Wynberg have spread, and in the case I studied the community-based social workers were all busy putting such programs in place in their community. They trained the volunteers, the ‘Eyes’, in a 12-week program with two meetings a week. {mospagebreak}

When accredited, the Eyes work in teams one week at a time over a four-week period in order not to burn out. Each team has a safety home, a family home in the community where a child can be placed temporarily in protection. The aim of the Eyes is not only to protect children, but also to be a support for the families. Family support teams are trained to work in homes with parents and show them ways to cope with normal circumstances like cooking healthy food and cleaning, relating to children.

You have to show (in a practical way) the community how to improve themselves. It is easy to speak of the big words ‘capacity building’ but doing it is not so easy. You have to start small. Their own circumstances must be the first thing, otherwise they will not cope with the pressures out in the community. Then the schools will be better off, then the churches will be better off, because you have a community that is more involved. (Leader of the Child and Family Welfare Society).
This local Child and Family Welfare Society has clearly reformulated its focus from an individual to a community perspective. The focus is now on getting the community involved in formulating their aims and methods of working, as exemplified in the Eyes project. The expression of mutual respect and the assumption that all people have strengths are evident in the projects in the Child and Family Welfare Society and are also in accordance with the whole idea of Ubuntu. In the work with the schools in the community, social workers try to make teachers aware of the children’s strengths instead of their deficits, and try to help them develop the schools as centres for generative energy in the community. The Eyes on the Child project is based on the explicit understanding that every individual has strength and that adults in the community can therefore care for children. The idea is based on community involvement and ownership of the program. The training is a mechanism of redistribution of the resources of knowledge and of agency in order to protect children.
The shared critical reflection involving group members, which is crucial to the Cornell empowerment definition as well as to Freire’s work, may be lacking in this case example of practical social work. But it is one of the major mechanisms that transformed community work to a powerful democratic and liberating instrument in the resistance years. Since the liberation, however, the involvement and support for civic movements and action groups have diminished, as people anticipate that the government will take responsibility (Le Roux, 1998; information from several interviews). Especially in relation to the exposed and vulnerable situation of children, critical reflection and shared action with community members and institutions are urgently needed.

Lullu Tshiwula, head of the association of schools of social work in South Africa, has similar thoughts on the practice of developmental social work, and emphasizes shared critical reflection and empowerment:

”It depends on what they have told you, for you to choose a strategy You have to look at what sort of strategy is appropriate at any given level. If for instance you are working with abuse women in a developmental way, you might have to group those women. Building their capacity by giving them information – what do they need? Do we have any safe houses? And then at any given point with the capacity you have built in those women, they take what you have told them to areas where they become advocates themselves; then that is empowering, but you are not empowering them, they are empowering themselves.”(from an interview) {mospagebreak}

Conclusion
Social welfare is the system set up to create social well-being in society as a whole. If the developmental perspective is applied to the level of social welfare and understood as integrating marginalized people into the economy, highlighting a productivist emphasis, it is hard to see that a developmental approach has actually been implemented in South Africa. Economic development is not steered towards social development but towards economic growth in South Africa, as in many other developing countries. The partnership between departments of welfare on one hand and departments of trade and economics on the other in creating jobs and productivist programs has not been attempted in the areas of families, women and children; rather ‘the department of welfare continues to pick up responsibility for programmes which fall under the jurisdiction of other government departments. The Flagship project for single mothers with young children is one such example,’ (Robinson and Biersteker, 1997).

The poverty discussed above cannot be remedied by social work. People cannot lift themselves by their bootstraps if they don’t have any bootstraps, as Terblanche and Tshiwula (1996) pointed out.
The picture changes if the developmental concept is linked to the level of social work instead of social welfare. The approach taken in South Africa shows that empowering groups and communities can be and is being implemented by social work and can inspire social work in other parts of the world, where individual casework is also coming to its end. Even in a developed institutional welfare state like Sweden, models of social work with focus on empowerment and network-building have proven their value for the families involved (Bak and Gunnarsson, 2000). We should here recall the reasons for choosing community work rather than individually oriented work during the years of the South African freedom battle. Community work was considered as a much more efficient use of resources than individual work. But most important was that community workers saw the possibility of changing the unequal power balance and the pressure towards conformity inherent in individualized social work. The critical reflection highlighted in the empowerment definition is a way to change this pressure to conformity and the unequal power balance. It implies bringing people in the community together to identify their own needs and ways to solve problems, thereby also helping community members to build a stronger local community and civil society.

In many developed countries, the vast suburbs are suffering from a multitude of problems where social work has to find more empowering and community-building ways of working. Developmental social work could be one model to inspire such a reorientation of social work.

The visit was financed by grants from the Swedish Institute, the Swedish Social Science Research Council and the Swedish Public Health Institute. Professor Sulina Green, Stellenbosch University, was a generous guide to social welfare in South Africa.