From Jakarta to Harare: The Shared Struggle to Decolonize Social Work

At first glance, the social welfare systems of Indonesia and Zimbabwe appear separated by more than just the expanse of the Indian Ocean. Yet, within academic circles, a growing movement to dismantle colonial-era social work frameworks has forged an unlikely bridge between Southeast Asia and Southern Africa.

At the center of this cross-continental dialogue is Adi Fahrudin, an Indonesian academic and editor-in-chief of the Asian Social Work Journal. Fahrudin has cultivated a deeply transnational perspective on social welfare, having served as a visiting professor at the Japan College of Social Work in Tokyo, alongside extensive academic tenures across Malaysia at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, and Universiti Sains Malaysia. This broad regional expertise has heavily informed his cross-cultural collaborations, which recently intersected with the development of social work literature in Zimbabwe. His involvement highlights a broader, complex trend in the Global South: the push to “indigenise” a profession that has long been dominated by Western, Eurocentric methodologies.

Historically, both Indonesia and Zimbabwe inherited social welfare systems from their respective colonial eras. These imported frameworks heavily prioritized individualized, clinical approaches, often at the expense of traditional, community-based methods of healing and mutual aid. For decades, practitioners in both nations have argued that these models frequently fail to resonate with local cultural realities, prompting a mutual academic pivot toward indigenous knowledge systems.

In Indonesia, this has manifested in a shift toward utilizing local philosophies of communal resilience, particularly in disaster response and poverty alleviation. In Zimbabwe, scholars have championed a parallel transformation, attempting to anchor the discipline in the philosophy of Hunhu or Ubuntu, the Southern African belief in collective responsibility and shared humanity.

However, the transition from theory to practice remains a structural hurdle. Critics of the indigenisation movement frequently point out that while the academic rhetoric is strong, operationalizing these local philosophies within systems that are still heavily influenced by Western funding and international NGO standards is a fraught process. It is within this tension that the collaboration between Indonesian and Zimbabwean scholars has found its footing.

Professor Fahrudin’s most visible footprint in this arena was his collaboration with Zimbabwean academics on the foundational text, Professional Social Work in Zimbabwe: Past, Present and Future. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, Fahrudin’s involvement provided a comparative framework, illustrating how another post-colonial nation navigates the friction between imported social work standards and indigenous realities.

For Zimbabwean scholars, this comparative lens proved highly practical. Dr. Vincent Mabvurira, a Zimbabwean native and a seasoned Social Work educator who has taught extensively at the University of Zimbabwe and Bindura University of Science Education noted that looking outside of Africa provided clarity on their own domestic challenges.

“Professor Fahrudin’s involvement didn’t just offer an Asian perspective; it provided a necessary comparative baseline for our own structural challenges,” said Dr. Mabvurira, a key contributor to the broader discourse on indigenisation. “By examining how Indonesia has wrestled with moving away from strictly Eurocentric models toward community-based interventions, we found a mirror for Zimbabwe. His work demonstrated that operationalizing indigenous practices is a shared, systemic hurdle across the Global South, preventing us from viewing our challenges in an isolated silo.”

The alliance between Indonesian and Zimbabwean academics is a testament to the shifting center of gravity in global social work. While the efficacy of these indigenised models will ultimately be tested in the field rather than the classroom, the ongoing dialogue proves that the effort to create a culturally resonant system of social justice is no longer a localized experiment, but a coordinated, transnational effort.