Social work community practice from a government discourse perspective: Motives for youth volunteers in controlling COVID-19 in Rwanda

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries were in emergencies to contain the envisioned danger. Rwanda was no exception. Among strategies adopted by the country to control the pandemic were community interventions by youth volunteers. Using social movement and self-determination theories, the paper investigated the policy perspective of the motives for the voluntary engagement of these youths in controlling the pandemic so that these motives could be documented for future emergencies. A qualitative approach was adopted to explore what motivated these youths by analysing government discourses, where data were collected from six government policy documents. The content analysis was done after grouping the data into two categories and subcategories using MAXQDA 22, a qualitative data analysis software, for data mapping and visualization. The results indicate that youth volunteers have been mainly motivated by institutional-level motives, whereby government leadership mobilisation and coordination had a high occurrence, and under the individual-level motives category, civic-mindedness behaviour occurred high. The paper argues that conducive policies are a key motivation for social work community practices. Social workers should advocate for conducive policies to increase the productivity of voluntary activities. Another study involving talking to youth volunteers may complement the current findings.