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This blog briefly reflects two recent scientific papers that call for an ecosocial approach in African social work education. Africa, as a historically oppressed continent, remains a primary victim of unsustainability, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, food insecurity, etc. While unsustainability is largely perpetrated by rich countries and industries of the Minority World, it significantly affects African countries and their most marginalised groups like children, women, and the poor. Addressing unsustainability requires a coordinated effort of various stakeholders, including the social work profession. Social work has a mandate to address the life challenges of people, especially those who are facing the consequences of unsustainability in Africa. However, conventional social work in Africa seems to have ignored the ecological/environmental dimension of sustainability. This shows a need to develop or adapt a new social work approach. One such approach is the ecosocial approach, which we advocated for in our recent papers.

The ecosocial approach argues for a holistic approach towards sustainable community development that combines social, economic, and ecological/environmental perspectives in social work. Therefore, having an ecosocial work content in African social work curricula will help to shape social work professional knowledge and values needed to address people鈥檚 life challenges in this time of global crises.

While the arguments advanced in our papers take the ecosocial work discourse to Africa, we note that the key concepts and practices that shape an ecosocial approach are already ingrained in the lived realities of African people.

With respect and consciousness not to repeat the same mistakes of blindly importing Western concepts into Africa, we critically reflected the ecosocial approach in tandem with African indigenous philosophies such as the Ubuntu. In fact, the ecosocial approach criticises Western modernism and neoliberal capitalism as underlying socioeconomic inequalities and environmental destruction worldwide. An ecosocial approach further encourages indigenous and Majority World perspectives in social work.

Why is an ecosocial approach important for African social work education?

Our first paper explores the gap in ecosocial work content in African social work curricula and advocates for an expanded focus on social work from human-centeredness and social perspectives to incorporate environmental/ecological perspectives. We argue that an ecosocial approach will help to decolonise and indigenise social work education in Africa and facilitate Africa鈥檚 drive towards sustainability. Decolonising social work education must entail, for instance, (i) identifying the elephant in the room, which is capitalism and imperialism, acknowledging the historical injustice this has caused and taking frantic steps to repair its consequential socio-economic inequality and ecological crisis, and (ii) transforming African social work from its colonial capitalist tradition and making it more culturally relevant for the African context. This leads to indigenising social work whereby the profession can revisit and emphasise the important African philosophies that revere the interconnections between nature and humanness, like Sankofa and Ubuntu1. We further recommend that African philosophies that involve direct experiences with nature must be integrated into social work field practices for social work students (see Tadesse & Obeng for specific examples). The second paper builds on the first one to propose a model of ecosocial work content for African social work education by highlighting various important topics that must be considered in an ecosocial work course. While this paper draws from emerging concepts about sustainability, we underline the need to centre them on culturally relevant examples from Africa.

We conclude by noting that ecosocial work would make African social work more attentive and responsive to human concerns and the biophysical environment of which humans are a part. We recommend closer collaborations in teaching, learning, and fieldwork between social work and other sciences focusing on environment or nature and with non-academic actors like local communities already practising ecosocial work and elders who are knowledgeable about human and nature relatedness. Below are a few points to consider when thinking and/or writing about the ecosocial approach in Africa.

• Reflecting and embracing an ecosocial worldview as part of nature. For example, assessing one鈥檚 life and society and identifying biophysical and spiritual dimensions that relate you to nature. Reading 1 captures how we embraced an ecosocial worldview.

• Being attentive to historical occurrences like colonialism and slavery that continue to impoverish the lives of Africans. Reading 2 presents arguments about ways to repair such unsustainable harms.

• Highlighting the vulnerability of Africa to climate change, natural and human resource exploitation, and socioeconomic inequality.

• Revisiting African indigenous wisdom and culturally relevant African practices as the main perspectives to shape an ecosocial work content and practice in Africa.

• Recognition, respect, and amplification of African perspectives and African authors who write about sustainability on the continent. Also, future authors who write about the ecosocial approach in Africa must be keen about reaching African readers through the publication channels they choose and by writing in (or translating texts to) local African languages. Reading 1 has its abstract translated into two African languages.

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