Social work with encamped refugees: reflections from Tongogara refugee camp in Zimbabwe

In this article, we draw on our joint experiences as social work practitioners and researchers in a rights-restricting practice context, a refugee camp. We reflect on social workers' roles in navigating the conundrum, that is, advocating against and in some unfortunate instances, perpetuating exclusionary systems. Refugee camps are physical zones designed to disentitle refugees of rights reserved for citizens. Faced with structural restrictions, social workers working with refugees have negotiated for rights with and on behalf of their clients at the center of their practice. We offer accounts of contextual application of anti-oppressive social work approaches for refugee wellbeing and access to rights like shelter, water, food, health, education, livelihoods, nutrition, sanitation, and protection. In the second half of our analysis, we offer a critical analysis of human rights education in Zimbabwean schools of social work given the manifest rights violations in the country's refugee welfare practice context. We examine the extent to which the pedagogy of human rights and notions of indiscriminate human development, democracy, and justice are infused in curricula to equip aspirant social workers with the requisite skills to transform their practice orientation from social control to the social change function which the practice context demands.