Culturally sensitive social work practice: Lessons from social work practitioners and educators in Ghana

Abstract

It has been argued that to be able to practice in a culturally sensitive manner, social workers in Ghana have to adopt strategies that are relevant for their socio-cultural context. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how social workers are implementing culturally sensitive social work approaches. This research investigated the various strategies that social workers have used in implementing culturally sensitive social work approaches. It has been revealed that in a bid to make their practice and education culturally sensitive, social work educators make use of local wise sayings, cases and examples, while practitioners were found to rely a lot on family dispute resolution strategies as well as the traditional authority system as part of practice techniques. This research argues that the emphasis of a culturally sensitive social work approach must be on teaching practitioners and educators how to negotiate the demands of culture, social work values, ethics and constitutional law and secondly, for educators to develop an understanding of their context and to use that understanding to explain social work concepts in a way that students can identify with.