“The Social Worker of Tomorrow and Fieldwork Today: Poverty and Urban Social Work in Africa in the 1990s”

There are many different theories concerning the causes of poverty. As Hardiman and Midgley (1982:51) point out, explanations that poverty is the result of “laziness, insobriety and irresponsibility”, which were widely accepted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are by no means obsolete today. On the other hand there are also various sociological explanations that suggest that social and political factors are primarily responsible. We can identify three major theories that tend to describe the causation of poverty, its relationship to development, and correspondingly suggest certain remedies. There is the “modernisation” school, the international structuralism, or “dependency theory” school, and the “developmental” school of thought.

A workshop paper on the impact of social work on urban poverty in the 1990's.