Being Visible in the Policy Process: The Experience of the School of Social Work at Addis Ababa University

Abstract Social work faculty regularly encourage students to engage in policy practice, often structuring course assignments to allow students to apply their social work knowledge and skills to the policy process. Faculty members, as part of the expectation that they engage in community service, often are themselves involved with community groups, agencies, organisations and government bodies to develop, revise and evaluate policies to promote social and economic justice. Less is known about how social work education programmes, as organisations, work to fulfil the profession’s expectations and mandates regarding promoting more just policies and programmes. Hence, qualitative data were collected from twenty participants, forty-nine documents and more than seventy email conversations to understand the experience of School of Social Work at Addis Ababa University. The School’s experience offers an example of how an educational enterprise using its faculty members can be involved in policy practice. This article identifies various activities in which the School has been involved over the past fifteen years as well as the challenges and benefits of being engaged in these forms of policy practice.