Corruption in Zimbabwe: Implications for Social Work Practice

Despite corruption being a major concern in Zimbabwe and many other Global South countries and being a chief contributor to poverty, it continues to receive minimal attention from the social work literature. This is not surprising considering that the social work profession in Zimbabwe, like many other countries, is predominantly focused on enhancing psychosocial functions of service users, rather than addressing the structural challenges they encounter. Therefore, most of the social work interventions are curative and remedial and have limited concern with structural issues such as corruption. Moving beyond this limited and unhelpful focus of the social work profession in Zimbabwe, this paper sets out to discuss corruption in Zimbabwe and offer the roles of social work in addressing it. I propose that social work practice should be reconfigured to focus on social justice and social change and social work education should be deconstructed from a remedial neoliberal discourse to focus on human rights and social justice, empower service users to act against corrupt practices and implore social workers to invoke moral outrage and participate in political activism.