Social work and the new social service professions in South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of the adoption of a social development paradigm on human resource planning within the welfare sector, focusing particularly on the consequences for social work and the rise of the social seivice professions. Social work, both in South Africa and in the Western world, evolved out of a political process which gave it legitimate sanction to offer social welfare services. 

In fact, in South Africa, the development of social work as a profession "as intimately tied to the development of government social welfare provision. Thus, for forty years social work enjoyed govermnent support and played a dominant role in the provision of organised welfare services, both government and private. Within the apartheid welfare system, private or voluntary welfare organisations were subsidised by government as recognised partners in welfare provision. In keeping with apartheid policy, their focus was mainly, though not exclusively, on white urban populations. Through the struggle years of the 1980s non governmental organisations, outside the established welfare sector, gained prominence. Foreign funding to support the struggle against apartheid and to address the needs of the neglected majority, increasingly became channelled through this anti-establishment sector.