For social work practitioners to effectively serve diverse populations, they need to develop cross-cultural competencies, understand the ways in which ethnicity, culture, and other factors can shape the needs of vulnerable groups, and appreciate the impact of global issues such as human rights. One effective way for students to get hands-on training on these topics is by completing a field placement in another country.

Even though international field placements can be highly beneficial for students, many social work programs do not yet have them in place, and those programs that are interested in doing so can face several challenges. First, developing, organizing, and maintaining international field placements is very time and resource intensive. Second, there is little information available to guide field educators and administrators about how to launch a new placement abroad. Third, international placements in low- and middle-income countries especially will involve an extra set of considerations and faculty efforts to safeguard the health of students while abroad, develop strong partnerships to keep the placement going, and ensure that the new placement benefits the host organization and not just the university where the student is from.

In the process of setting up the first international field placement for our MSW program, we created a comprehensive checklist to determine how suitable a potential field site abroad was and how ready they were to host students from the U.S. Because the first placement we explored was located in Sub-Saharan Africa, we had to address all the issues of safety, sustainability, and mutual benefits mentioned above. An initial checklist was developed by a small group of professors with expertise in field education, study abroad, community partnerships, and assessment. Then, we asked for feedback from a student with experience in that particular country and from staff of the host agency to further refine the checklist.

We had to pause this study due to international travel restrictions in place from 2020-2022 due to COVID-19. We hope to restart work on this project soon and continue our efforts to pilot and then finalize the checklist. (Updates will be posted here when available)

We hope that our checklist will help other social work programs to plan and develop their own international field placements and provide meaningful international experiences for their BSW and MSW students.