Digital Social Work Across Africa and Asia: A Decolonial Framework for the Future of the Global South

Across Africa and Asia, social work is being remade by digital technology, yet the international literature on digital social work remains anchored in Global North experience. Mobile money is changing how welfare reaches the poor. Biometric identification governs access to social protection. Algorithmic systems make eligibility decisions about families. Mobile messaging coordinates community advocacy and disaster response. Practitioners in African and Asian contexts are not catching up to these developments. They are shaping them. This book is the first focused theorisation of digital social work across Africa and Asia. Drawing on policy analysis, decolonial scholarship from both regions, and primary qualitative data from 234 frontline social workers, the authors develop a comprehensive decolonial framework for digital practice in the Global South. Africa and Asia are treated as a single intellectual landscape, with attention to mobile-first infrastructure, communal living, indigenous knowledge, multilingual societies, and post- colonial welfare states. The book introduces several foundational contributions, including the Asia-African Digital Justice Framework, Communal Digital Safeguarding for shared-device households, and the Shared Screen Dilemma in low-income environments. Chapters cover the digital divide, data privacy, algorithmic bias, mobile money, social media, crisis intervention, big data, and indigenous innovation, closing with a framework for the next generation of African and Asian social work education. Written for social work academics, researchers, graduate students, and policymakers, this book argues that the future of digital social work is being shaped in the Global South.