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Hadih Deedat traces his interest in child welfare to his years growing up in Ghana, West Africa. An assistant professor of social work, he remembers questioning certain cultural norms that allowed corporal punishment of children and practices such as genital mutilation of young girls. “Growing up, I saw that and I thought, ‘This is not right.’ … Even at the age of 14 or 15, I was questioning that.”

That reaction informed Deedat’s career and academic research. He worked in Delaware’s child welfare system after earning his master’s degree in public health. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on flaws in foster care, focusing on problems encountered by teens when they age out of the system with no preparation for living on their own. “It’s like a calling,” he says. “I really wanted to do something to protect children.”

His interests in child welfare continued after coming to WCU in 2019. He teaches the only course focusing on child welfare in the undergraduate social work department. He has returned to Ghana, taking WCU students to the West African nation to research child welfare.

Deedat received a 2021 Provost Research Grant that enabled him to take students to Ghana to study child welfare practices in May 2022. Graduate assistant Sarah Vengen and Alex Chips, an undergraduate social work student from WCU’s Philadelphia location, spent three weeks investigating whether the country employs a public health approach to child welfare practices, which emphasizes prevention.

“We wanted to see if they were using the public health approach, which means they are doing more education, providing more sensitization, teaching people how not to abuse their children and how to avoid neglecting their children,” he says. “We found that the Ghana child welfare system, like most of the world, is more reactionary in nature rather than prevention-focused.”

Deedat presented this research at the 2023 International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in Oxford, England. He is preparing a manuscript for publication with Vengen and Chips. When published, it will give the two students their first article in a scholarly journal. Now he is seeking funding to take two more students to study food insecurity in Ghana.

During his first research trip, Deedat forged a partnership with Palm University College in Ghana’s Greater Accra Region. A study abroad experience was created from the partnership and two undergraduate social work students spent the spring 2023 semester studying there, taking online classes at WCU while conducting field work. A second cohort of students from different majors will spend the spring 2024 semester at the University of Ghana.

“I really wanted to do something to protect children.”

“What they will be doing is cultural immersion activities,” Deedat explains. “…They will be able to visit historic sites to get to know about the country. Ghana was one of the epicenters of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, serving as one of the main West African holding points for enslaved Africans who were sent to the Americas and Europe.”

Deedat plans to transition the semester-long Ghana experience to a two-week January term session in 2025 that will enable more WCU students to participate. He has recently developed an undergraduate-level elective that looks at the intersection of public health and social work. He plans to connect this elective to the two-week winter term study abroad program in Ghana, which will allow students to gain an understanding of different social work practices there.

“That’s the intent of the study abroad program that I’m revising: that it can be centered on child welfare and other social work practices through a public health and social work lens,” Deedat says.