SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE AND EDUCATION IN SIERRA LEONE: A HISTORICAL REVIEW

Authors: Sylvester Amara Lamin, PhD., EdD, Victor Massaquoi, PhD, Moses Fullah, PhD, Michael Mitchell Conteh, Maurice Momoh Kargbo & George Mansaray

ABSTRACT

Africa had an organized informal social work education and practice system that evolved around indigenous knowledge that kept their communities functional. However, European and American perspectives influenced African social work education, “with little attention paid to how social supports evolved in Africa” (Krietzer, 2012, p. 2) extensively. Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Africa, was opened as a liberal arts college (Koso-Thomas, 2019), and it took the University of Sierra Leone (USL) an exceptionally long time before it developed a social work program. The main document analyzed for this study is the Standardized Curriculum developed by consultants hired by UNICEF Sierra Leone in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Welfare and Children’s Affairs at the time. Morgan (2021) states that “document analysis has been an underused approach to qualitative research” (p. 64). The standardized curriculum has more details from the Global North, specifically from the United States of America, than the Global South, even though the social work personnel may lack the requisite knowledge and expertise to provide instruction.

Keywords: social work education, social work practice, standardized curriculum, document analysis

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