Mapping social work education in the West Africa region: Movements toward indigenization in 12 countries’ training programs

This article presents the results of a systematic mapping of social work training programs in countries throughout West Africa, a region historically under‐represented in global discussions of the social welfare workforce. The research illuminates how social workers and related professionals are trained to engage in social work practice in a number of West African countries. The research was conducted in two phases. In the initial phase, the research team collected documents from 12 West African countries and conducted phone interviews with relevant individuals. The second phase included field research in five West African countries ? Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal ? where the research team conducted semi‐structured interviews and group discussions with 253 individuals. Framed by indigenization theory, this study describes social service training institutes in West Africa and highlights the varying degrees to which programs have been adapted to indigenous and endogenous realities in the postcolonial era.     

Population Ageing in Japan: A Brief Survey

During the next fifty years, the absolute number of elderly in Japan will increase while the absolute number of children and persons in the working age groups will decline. The main cause of this demographic trend is low fertility, which can in turn be traced mostly to delayed and foregone marriages. Absent policy measures and sociocultural change to reduce young women's opportunity costs of marriage and childbearing, it is difficult to imagine this demographic situation changing. Policy makers have stressed the importance of keeping elderly workers in the labour force. However, the problem is not elderly labour force participation per se (which is already very high for a country with Japan's per capita income) but rather the relatively low productivity of elderly workers, who are often employed part-time, work informally in private unincorporated enterprises, etc. Reforms to Japan's public pension system, which is essentially financed on a pay as you go basis with benefits linked to wages, have not been very effective to date. Official projections call for steep increases in the payroll contribution rate. In contrast to the pension system, the Japanese health system has managed to deliver high-quality care at a relatively low cost as measured by health spending as a proportion of GDP. More must be done, however, to expand the availability of long-term disabled elderly. The article concludes with a few observations elicited for European policy makers.     

Captain George Henry Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers and the Prehistory of the IUSSP

Captain George Henry Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers, Secretary General of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP, 1928–ca. 1942), the precursor of today's International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP, 1947–present), was a central figure in population science during the 1930s. With his pro‐Nazi activism, anti‐Semitism, Red‐baiting, and failure to leave any intellectual mark of consequence, he is an idiosyncratic and in some ways unattractive subject. However, an examination of Pitt‐Rivers's role as Secretary General reveals a wealth of information about the IUSIPP as it lurched toward collapse. It casts light, as well, on the struggle for scientific legitimacy between eugenic racialists and reformers in the 1930s, a struggle in which he played a controversial and divisive role. Using a combination of newly discovered and old archival material, this article traces Pitt‐Rivers's involvement with the Union, the British eugenics establishment, Nazi population science, and far‐right British politics during this turbulent decade when demography emerged as an international discipline.