By Ibrahim Kabba Turay
The Ministry of Social Welfare with support from the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund(UNICEF) and in collaboration with Ministry of Technical and Higher Education, on Tuesday,May 24, launched the revised and harmonized social work curricular at Bintumani Hotel, Aberdeen in Freetown.
In his keynote address, Minister of Lands, Dr. Turad Senesie, said the keynote address was supposed to have been delivered by Vice President Juldeh Jalloh,who was unavoidably absent.
He said when President Bio was running for the Presidency he promised to make education a flagship programme and that true his words he has kept his promise by allocating 22% of the nation’s budget to education.
He said with support from UNICEF in 2018, the government has been working with colleges and universities to formalize and institutionalize social work training through the review and standardization of existing curricular to make them context specific as well as user-friendly.
He maintained that the ministry of social welfare has also collaborated with UNICEF to provide in service training for lecturers from social work department in all university and colleges offering social work courses.
He added that it’s expected that after training, students will now have the practical skills and knowledge to appropriately manager cases, thus noting that the revised curricular is practice based and aligned to global social work standards and will ensure social workers are formally trained.
He thanked the Ministry of Social Welfare and partners for having done a great job in the preparation of the document, adding that he believe that the training institutions would be enhanced in the delivery of social work training programmes.
The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), representative, Dr. Suleiman Braimoh, in his words said, the need for investment into training of social workers cannot be understated, because they still have a cadre of social workers at community and district levels that were not adequately trained.
Minister of Social Welfare, Baindu Dassama, said the revised curricular will ensure the development of competencies and skills required to be able to practise social work.
