Social Work Practice in Africa: Indigenous and Innovative Approaches

Janestic Mwende TWIKIRIZE, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, Makerere University, Uganda. She holds a PhD in Social Work and Social Development. Dr Twikirize served as the Vice President of the Association of Schools of Social Work in Africa (ASSWA) and as a board member of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) from 2012 to 2018. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal International Social Work. She is the East Africa Regional Coordinator of PROSOWO, a six-member institutional academic partnership project to professionalise social work in East Africa. She has served as a Visiting Lecturer at Gothenburg University, Sweden, and University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research areas and published works focus on social work in Africa, indigenisation of social work, gender and child rights.

Helmut SPITZER, PhD, is a Professor of Social Work at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Austria. He served as Overall Coordinator of the projects PROSOWO I (2011-2014) and PROSOWO II (2016-2018) on the promotion of professional social work in East Africa. His teaching, research and publications (in German and English) focus on international social work, social work methods, gerontological social work, children in especially difficult circumstances, crosscultural research, and social work in East Africa. The book Professional Social Work in East Africa: Towards Social Development, Poverty Reduction and Gender Equality (2014), which he published together with Janestic M. Twikirize and Gidraph G. Wairire, has become a major reference on social work in the East African region.