Social work in South Africa is a diverse profession providing a wide array of services across the lifespan to individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.
Social work’s mission is:
- to restore or enhance human wellbeing while addressing environmental forces that contribute to problems in living with particular attention to the needs and
- empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty and inequality.
- Social workers often provide services as members of an interdisciplinary team or on a one-to-one basis with individual clients, patients, and consumers.
- Social work aims to help people develop or maintain coping skills and to facilitate client empowerment in order to solve their own problems.
- Social work is concerned with individual and personal problems but also with broader social issues such as poverty, unemployment, domestic and community violence, inequality and health disparities.