This book has been written as a legacy to the doyens of Student Counselling and Development (SCD) in South and Southern Africa. It is an acknowledgement of their relentless efforts to improve SCD and to redress the inequalities and injustices of the past. This book fills an important gap in the literature about SCD within an African context, as it allows the voices of student counsellors in South Africa to be heard and to discuss aspects of SCD as they experience and practise it.

SCD has gone through different stages, as discussed in Section 1. The annual conference of the professional association, the Southern African Association for Counselling and Development in Higher Education (SAACDHE), with a developmental and research stream, is evidence of the professionalisation of SCD. The developmental stream provides training opportunities, while the research stream enables the development of theory and the promotion of research and evidence-driven practice. It provides continuous professional development points to registered psychologists and counsellors as required by the professional board. It also provides a platform on which to disseminate information and research results, and provides discussion forums for SCD practitioners who might otherwise work in isolation at smaller institutions.

The theoretical and conceptual foundations of SCD, described in Section 2, provide an overview and lay the foundation for the rest of the book. The following sections and chapters provide an overview of domain-specific theories as applied to different programmes, services and special groups. It is the intention of the book to provide an overview of applicable theories at the request of counselling interns, who expressed their uncertainty when using a theoretical framework and their confusion at the large array of theories available. The various chapters of the book thus provide guidelines for student counsellors and highlight the challenges and research gaps.

The editors acknowledge that there are numerous further topics that deserve to be included in a book of this nature, but limited space has prevented us from doing so. It is our hope that future books will include chapters on those topics. We hope that this book will be of use for the in-service training and orientation of newly appointed student counsellors, interns and those from related professions, for example social workers.