I read Digital Social Work Across Africa and Asia: A Decolonial Framework for the Future of the Global South mainly through this link between social work and mental health. The book discusses digital change, but the deeper issue is what happens when a person’s difficult life is turned into a record, an assessment or a category.The book is written by Siddhartha Paul Tiwari, PhD, FRAS, FRAI, of Google Asia Pacific, Adi Fahrudin of Esa Unggul University and Fentiny Nugroho of the University of Indonesia. It is published by the University of Indonesia Press.The authors want social work in Africa and Asia to be understood through the experiences of people living and working in these regions. Putting two vast continents into one volume is an ambitious undertaking. It is also where the book sometimes loses its footing.Africa and Asia do not share one welfare system or one understanding of family, illness and care. Even within Africa, social workers operate under very different laws, traditions and working conditions. The book recognises these differences but often moves on before examining them properly.I wanted it to remain longer with the social worker sitting across from a person in distress. What does that person choose to say? What is left unsaid because a family member is nearby? What happens when private information is entered into a record that may later be read by several institutions? These questions matter greatly in mental-health work.Distress is not always easy to describe, and it does not always fit neatly into a form. It may be connected to grief, poverty, family conflict, violence, unemployment or the burden of caring for another person. A record may capture the symptoms while missing the life around them. The book introduces the idea of Communal Digital Safeguarding. It questions the usual assumption that privacy belongs only to one individual using one private device. This makes sense in families where decisions and responsibilities are often shared.But the idea also creates problems that the book does not fully resolve. Family involvement can support someone who is struggling, but it can also prevent honest disclosure. A person may not want relatives to know everything discussed with a social worker. The book needed to spend more time on these tensions.For Botswana, the real question is not simply whether social work should become more digital. It is whether change can improve mental-health care without weakening trust, confidentiality and the local knowledge on which good social work depends.The book would also have benefited from fuller examples of people moving between social workers, clinics, schools and community organisations. A referral may look simple on paper. In real life, people can be passed from one service to another while no one takes responsibility for the whole problem.The lack of detailed attention to child social work in Africa is the book’s most serious weakness. Children have little control over what adults record about them. A judgement made during one difficult period may remain in a file for years and shape how teachers, health workers and welfare officers later see that child.Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”The quotation is relevant because child protection and child mental health would have put the book’s ideas under real pressure. Questions of consent, privacy, family involvement and professional responsibility become much harder when the person concerned is a child. Yet this area receives too little space.The book’s discussion of local control also needed to go further. From a social-work point of view, the important issue is not only who owns or manages a system. It is who decides what counts as mental illness, risk, neglect or a troubled family.A locally managed system can still do harm if it uses rigid forms and narrow definitions. A social worker must be able to explain context, question a poor assessment and disagree with a decision that does not reflect the person’s life. The book begins an important discussion, but it sometimes becomes too broad when the subject demands close attention. A second edition should spend more time inside particular countries and real cases. It should give child social work and mental health in Africa a much larger place and show how social workers deal with the difficult space between families, communities and health services.
