INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE ISSN 1369-6866 © 2008 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. 166 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2007.00544.x Int J Soc Welfare 2008: 17: 166 –173 Engelbrecht L. Economic literacy and the war on poverty: a social work challenge? Int J Soc Welfare 2008: 17: 166–173 © 2008 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article reports on an exploratory descriptive study that examined ten social workers’ perceptions of their war on poverty and the challenges in constructing a conceptual framework for the development of a Social Community Education for Economic Literacy Development (SCEELD) programme. It was found that the social workers were knowledgeable about the uneconomic activities of their clients and that their ideas about what needed to be done about this related very much to their attitudes towards poverty. Significantly, the social workers did not think that job creation was their primary responsibility nor had, in their experience, job creation programmes been successful. Rather, the economic literacy they taught related to housekeeping imperatives, such as economical food preparation and manag- ing income and concrete resources no matter how meagre. Overall, the social workers did not perceive the agency culture or the context of developmental welfare practice as conducive to the implementation of programmes aimed at economic development, and none talked about the relationship between economic and social development. Lambert Engelbrecht University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK IJSW International Journal of Social Welfare 1369-6866 © 2008 The Author(s), Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare XXX Original Articles Economic literacy and the war on poverty Engelbrecht Economic literacy and the war on poverty: a social work challenge? Key words: economic literacy, poverty, social work, South Africa Lambert Engelbrecht, Arts Building, University of Stellenbosch, P/Bag x1, Matieland 7602, South Africa E-mail: lke@sun.ac.za Accepted August 15, 2007 During the past five decades, the world has seemed eager to occupy the moral high ground and offer end- less international aid to try and help Africa as a whole to overcome its poverty. Africa south of the Sahara has in fact received more than US$1 trillion in international aid over the past 50 years. In current monetary terms, that translates to US$5,000 for every man, woman and child on the continent, yet numerous African countries today are worse off than they were 50 years ago (Oppenheimer, 2005). In fact, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where poverty has increased over the past decade. Between 1980 and 2002 the region’s contribution to world trade, for example, was reduced by half. Against this background, the inter- national community, through the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (United Nations, 2000), set targets for the eradication of extreme poverty. The Millennium Development Goals initiative provided one of the reasons Africa was given priority at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit of G8 countries, which responded with the Africa Action Plan in support of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) (G8 Gleneagles Africa, 2005). The situation regarding poverty relief is not much different in South Africa even though the delivery of social services in the period since the first democratic elections of 1994 has seen a massive shift of fiscal resources to the poor (Van der Berg, 2004). Almost half the country’s people live in poverty, with the poorest of the poor, an estimated 15 per cent of the population of 46.9 million (Statistics South Africa, 2005), struggling desperately to survive from day to day. The benefits of South Africa’s democratic freedoms are passing them by. South Africa, together with Brazil, has the most uneven income distribution in the world with a Gini-coefficient (a measure of income inequality where 0 corresponds to perfect equality and 1 corresponds to perfect inequality) of 0.73 in 2001 (Landman, 2003). Yet the increase in the number of super-rich South Africans over a one-year period is matched only by Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. More than half of Africa’s dollar millionaires are based in South Africa (Piliso, 2005). Therefore, although many South Africans enjoy a higher standard of living than ever before, the poorest have become even poorer. In the formal sector it is estimated, for example, that unemployment rose from 20.2 per cent in 1970 to 26.1 per cent in 1994 and almost doubled to 45 per cent in 2002 (Scholtz, 2005). Although these unofficial figures differ substantially from the government’s unemployment figures, Statistics South