. Now--in Africa, in Latin America, and parts of Asia
--the same challenges and opportunities had re-emerged.

While social and economic development activities had long been under way,
particularly in Latin America and Asia, these had been isolated projects
carried out by groups of believers under the guidance of individual
National Assemblies, and unrelated to any plan. In October 1983, however,
Baha'i communities throughout the world were called on to begin
incorporating such efforts into their regular programmes of work. An
Office of Social and Economic Development was created at the World Centre
to coordinate learning and help seek financial support.

The decade that followed saw wide experimentation in a field of work for
which most Baha'i institutions had little preparation. While striving to
benefit from the models being tried by the many development agencies
operating around the world, Baha'i communities faced the challenge of
relating what they found in various areas of concern--education, health,
literacy, agriculture and communications technology--to their understanding
of Baha'i principles. The temptation was great, given the magnitude of the
resources being invested by governments and foundations, and the
confidence with which this effort was pursued, merely to borrow methods
current at the moment or to adapt Baha'i efforts to prevailing theories.
As the work evolved, however, Baha'i institutions began turning their
attention to the goal of devising development paradigms that could
assimilate what they were observing in the larger society to the Faith's
unique conception of human potentialities.

Nowhere was the strategy of the successive Plans so impressively
vindicated as was the case in India. The community there has today become
a giant of the Cause, numbering well over a million souls. Its work
stretches across the expanse of a vast sub-continent, home to an immense
diversity of cultures, languages, ethnic groups and religious traditions.
In many respects, the experience of this greatly blessed body of believers
encapsulates the Baha'i world's struggles, experiments, setbacks and
victories throughout these critical three decades. The dramatic rise in
enrolments had brought with it all of the problems being encountered
elsewhere in the world, but on a massive scale. The long road leading the
Indian Baha'i community to its present-day eminence was beset with the
most painful difficulties, some of which