Social Work in Ethiopia: Historical Endeavors and Contemporary Status - A Scoping Literature Review

This exploratory scoping review has been conducted to fill the gap of comprehensive evidence on the historical endeavors and contemporary status of social work in Ethiopia. Accordingly, various literature (both academic and grey literature) were included in the analysis to uncover the scenarios. Social work in Ethiopia constitutes the age-old Indigenous Social Support Systems (ISSSs) and the formal social work. 

The ISSSs endured throughout generations while the formal social work had started as a practice in 1955 and scholarship in 1959. Formal social work in Ethiopia experienced seesaw existence and its evolvement went through four successive phases of Early (1959-1974), Dead Decades (1974-2004), Renaissance (2004-2007), and Contemporary Phases (2007 – 2023) classified based on historic turning points of early inception, closure, re-emergence, and expansion respectively. This contributed to its stunted development and current infancy. Unlike the ISSSs, formal social work has formal structures and stakeholders to function. 

In a nutshell, the contemporary social work in Ethiopia is a ‘Discorded Social Work’ that lacks synergization - the complementary integration of local (ISSSs) and global social work (formal social work) constituents and realities, thereby seeks the collaboration of Global-North and Global-South social work stakeholders and actors to synergize it.