Changes and challenges Preparing social work students for practicums in today's sub-Saharan African context

This article provides an overview of the sub-Saharan African context, where the pace of change has been particularly rapid throughout the 1990s, and summarizes shifts in how five leading NGOs that send out volunteers and development workers and two volunteer orienting organizations to prepare people to live in Africa. The implications for the preparation provided by schools of social work for students undertaking African practicums are then discussed. This article suggests that there is a need for Canadian schools of social work to incorporate issues of risk in their preparation processes for international practicum students. While the focus has been on sub-Saharan Africa, the features and causes of the changes delineated in this article are not dissimilar to those in other parts of the world. The authors argues that incorporating a risk management approach can have unintended consequences for students’ understandings and that care must be taken to structure learning opportunities, including post-practicum de-briefing, that enable students to develop a social justice based comprehension of the contexts they encounter overseas.