The International Federation of Social Workers

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Published by The International Federation of Social Workers
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Cover Design & Layout: Pascal Rudin
1st July 2020
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The Social Work Response to COVID-19 - Six Months On

Championing changes in services andpreparing for long-term consequences
Rory Truell, IFSW Secretary-General
1st July 2020

Health researchers may puzzle overwhy COVID-19 rates are lower inAfrica than many other parts of theworld, but the day-to-day routine ofsocial worker Abebe Ayana in Ethiopia demonstrates how much hard
work is going into keeping things
that way.
Abebe works with refugees fromSouth Sudan in the huge Jewi campin the Gambella region, each day
providing handwashing demonstrations and working with the refugeecommunity to spread messages
about infection control. Miraculously, there is not yet a single case of
COVID-19 among the 60,000 inhabitants of the camp. It’s all about preparation and prevention.
“We are preparing for remote casemanagement and psychological firstaid support, and supporting refugees using helpline phones,” says

Abebe. “We are working especiallyon engaging the community throughworking closely with community
leaders in the camp.”
There’s no doubt, he says, that theexperiences of the rest of the world
have informed Ethiopia’s coordinated response, as have Africancountries’ community-based responses to the Ebola outbreak in 201416.
Six months into the global pandemic,
Africa’s community-based response
is one of many positive examples ofsocial work’s impact, with workers
helping build systems of informal
education and support within communities where there is little in theway of state social or health services.
Elsewhere in the world, cultural factors, previous experiences of natio-3

nal crises, and the varied approaches of national governments, haveall influenced social work responses. The result is that, although there are positive examples of achievement everywhere, the end of thefirst stage of the pandemic meansvery different things to social workers in different countries.
While the emphasis for social workers in African and Latin Americancountries is still to minimise the impact of a first wave of COVID-19,
others in Asia and Europe are tryingto stabilise services as cases peakor drop, while also confronting thereal possibility of a second wave.
What is becoming clearer to socialworkers everywhere is that the greatest threat now may not be the virus itself, but its wider and longer
consequences on individuals, families, communities and societies.
In an earlier global overview, I outlined the first four phases of thesocial work response to COVID-19:
1. Making governments recognisethat a social response is imperative;
2. Advocating for social services toremain open during lockdown;
3. Adapting social services to a newworld and managing ethical dilemmas;

4. Integrating transformative practice.
One month later, and six months into
the pandemic, IFSW’s global overview suggests that the next phase is
one of service re-organisation associal workers – wherever they are– look to the challenges ahead.
Gayle, a social worker in New Zealand, explained: “Now nearly all
homeless people have been supported into motels. But what happens next? With the economic challenges will they be dumped backinto the streets?”
Another social worker in central
Africa who works within a Ministryof Social Affairs explained to me thatthat his country’s budget had been
set when the price of oil was $65 perbarrel. Since the pandemic that price has slipped below $40, resulting
in significant government andoverseas funding being diverted away from social development.
Abebe from Ethiopia too sees thewider challenge: the threat of COVID-19 has led to panic and stress, adecrease in maternal health followup, a rise in malaria cases and a
50% decrease in ART treatments forHIV. Of particular concern to Abebe,a senior gender-based violence programme officer for International

4Medical Corps, is a reported rise inchild abuse, rape and domestic violence against women and girls. Hecalls this “the shadow pandemic”.
In countries that experienced an earlier first wave, urgent discussion
about emergency measures has turned to looking to the longer-termsocial work implications. In Italy, thefirst phase was all about rapid innovation. Luigi Colaianni, a social worker from Milan, has likened this tothe way that the Apollo 13 astronauts addressed the potential catastrophe of an oxygen tank exploding
on the way to the moon.
“Faced with an unexpected crisis,
they overcame it creatively using
basic skills and materials which were already available, but which had
not previously been considered,”says Luigi. “Likewise, social workers
have strategies that are effective
during crises. We have treasured
this and generated scientificallysound practices.”
At Milan Central Station, a drop-in
centre for homeless and vulnerable
people was closed by authorities on
11th March despite physical distancing measures after one visitor entered with a fever and spat blood onthe floor. The risk was too great.
This led to a complete re-organisation of services. Social workers based themselves in hostels forthe homeless, staying with vulnerable people who now had to bequarantined, providing them with
supplies and supporting known
contacts via phone and Skype.
Barbara Scotti, a social worker who
helped lead the reorganisation, hasbeen supporting clients and social
workers remotely from home. “It’strue we have found different ways ofworking to meet existing demands,”
she says. “But the situation is always changing and the demands areincreasing. The numbers of people
in trouble – having lost work or money – will increase. So how can wecope with all these requests that are
arriving at the phone centre? The
future will be worse, with more demand and fewer resources.”
Her concern is echoed by Claudio
Pedrelli, a social worker working
with older people in Emilia Romagna, Italy. In some parts of the region,
half of elderly people in hospitals
have died as a result of COVID-19.
It hasn’t been easy responding to theneeds of older people and their families, says Claudio – partly because
managers haven’t always understood that keeping services going
isn’t simply a matter of logistics.

5Social work starts with counsellingand connection – even if it’s behind amask, he says. Many social workers
have found it difficult to implement
emergency rationing decisions, denying support to some so that others
can receive it.
“We have had many different kindsof crisis in the past,” he says. “We’ve
had earthquakes and floods. Butorganisations never learn how to
prepare to face these situations.
We’ve adjusted to a health crisis but
now we have to adjust a social andeconomic crisis.”
Iceland has its own experience ofnational crisis to draw on – the financial crash of 2008-2011. Vilborg
Oddsdóttir, a social worker who supports vulnerable groups under thecharity Icelandic Church Aid, wasdoing the same job when the banking system collapsed in 2008 andsees many of the same issues arising as the economic implications of
the pandemic take hold. Althoughmany people have received government support for several months,
financial assistance is dropping off
as time goes by.
Around 50% more people are seeking help from her organisationcompared with last year, she says.
And she has noticed a subtle diffe-

rence in the way that the COVID crisis is affecting vulnerable people
compared to 2008.
“It has changed how they feel insidethemselves,” she says. “They arefrail and vulnerable, and they don’tknow what to do. The difference isthat in the financial crisis, people
were really angry – but angry together and empowering each other.
They had someone to blame. But
they don’t now. They are often isolated, worrying about being sick andthe future.”
This poses a real problem for socialworkers. “It is more difficult to workwith people who are afraid all thetime and very lonely. You can have a
dialogue with people who are angry,
talk about what they’re angry about.
But if people are simply afraid theyeither don’t want to talk or don’t
want to get in touch. They haveclosed themselves down.”
Outside Europe, in Asian countries
where the pandemic first took afoothold, relief at the gradual opening up of social infrastructure is
now accompanied by concerns about
new outbreaks. Three months after
COVID-19 cases peaked in SouthKorea, local upsurges
have meant everyone, including
social workers, is remaining vigilant.

6Sug Pyo Kim, President of Daegu
Association of Social Workers, reports that although schools are beginning to open, community centres
for elderly and low-income people
and other social facilities are closed
until the government sees no evidence of spread from school opening. Meanwhile, social workers areworking harder than ever. “We provide mobile services all day long tosupport daily necessities and tocheck the safety of clients, as wellas preparing for the opening of thefacilities,” he says.
Throughout the world, increasingstrain on the profession is inevitable
as demand increases, and financial
and internal resources decline. Butsocial workers are also saying they
will find a way, because that is whatsocial workers do.
For Claudio Pedrelli, the approachthat clearly buffers the social effects
of COVID-19 best is at the core ofsocial work. It is the same community-centred approach that is showing
its worth across the world. “The local networks social workers havehelped create during the pandemic
to counter isolation and provide services are continuing,” he says.
“Over recent years, the emphasis onindividual need has forced manysocial workers to abandon community work. But what has happened inrecent months has shown the importance of working more at thecommunity level. Now these networks have been created, we need
to work to sustain them and focus
more on the village, the locality, andmaintain these relationships.”
These kinds of community-wide interventions were once the hallmarkof the profession globally. From the1980s onwards we have encountered the rise of government policies
that drive social services to a shortterm focus on individuals or casemanagement as opposed to supporting relationships within families andcommunities for their immediateand long-term development. Thishas meant that, in some countries,
social work’s roots in community
development has been almost forgotten.
Yet the conversations above showthat social workers around theworld are reclaiming their community development heritage and proving that this approach is necessary– not just in reducing the effects ofthe pandemic but also in facing future challenges.
The profession at the global levelhas also changed. From a pre-7

pandemic culture of arranging faceto-face meetings, which created cost
and travel barriers for many, we
have rapidly and successfully moved
to online ways of working far moreconsistent with our professional
value of inclusiveness. Global andregional webinars have become
mainstream and the forthcoming
online IFSW General Meeting andWorld Conference have significantly
higher registrations than any previous occasions – including thefounding conference for the international profession in Paris in 1928
which had 5000 participants. We
have moved forward.
Yet there is no room for complacency at all levels. As Claudio thefrontline social worker in Italy
pointed out, it is all too easy to let
services and arrangements slip
back to the way they were: focusedon the individual, case management
and non-inclusive professional decision making.
The social work “lived experience”
examples in this article show howsocial workers are setting a strong
base for the challenges ahead. This

current phase of the social workresponse to COVID-19 will involve
many of us, like them, championing
change in our work environments.
We will be working towards policy
engagement with communities, active community responses that support the wellbeing of all and social
services becoming platforms forcommunities to thrive and avert catastrophe, not agencies for pickingup the pieces.
Rory Truell

Acknowledgments
My greatest thanks to Simon
Crompton, a journalist currently working with IFSW, forinterviewing a number of thepeople mentioned in this article and to all the frontline
social workers for taking thetime to share their experiences and wisdom.

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