History in Brief
Bahá’í experience in the field of development stretches back to the beginnings of the Faith in Iran during the nineteenth century. The emphasis placed in the Bahá’í teachings on education provided the impulse for the establishment of a network of Bahá’í schools across the country. Among them was the Tarbíyat school for girls that was initiated in the early 1900s in the capital and gained national renown. In that country, the community of adherents was able, in just a few generations, to advance from a population consisting largely of individuals without an ability to read and write to one whose members were in the forefront of many areas of endeavor. By 1973, Iranian Bahá’ís had achieved a 100 percent literacy rate among women followers under the age of 40, in contrast to a national literacy rate among women of less than 20 percent at that time.
In the decades that followed, efforts to give practical expression to Bahá’u’lláh’s exhortation to “render service to the world of humanity” continued to take shape across Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, albeit on a modest and sporadic scale. Social and economic development initiatives such as literacy programs and schools were being carried out as isolated projects by groups and individuals. Radio projects and efforts to advance the status of women also began to emerge.
The Bahá’í community’s involvement in social and economic development became more widespread and received greater emphasis in the early 1980s, chiefly as a result of a substantial increase in the Bahá’í populations of many nations. The years that followed constituted a period of experimentation, characterized simultaneously by enthusiasm and hesitation, thoughtful planning and haphazard action, achievements and setbacks. While most projects found it difficult to escape the patterns of development practice prevalent in the world, some offered glimpses of promising paradigms of action. From this initial stage of diverse activity, the community emerged in the early 1990s with the pursuit of social and economic development firmly established as a feature of its organic life, and with enhanced capacity to forge over time a distinctly Bahá’í approach.
The decades since then have seen a marked increase in capacity for undertaking social action, leading to an efflorescence of activity. Compared with 1996, when some 250 social and economic development projects were being sustained from year to year, in 2022 there were over 2,000, and the number of Bahá’í-inspired development organizations had quadrupled to exceed 170. The number of grassroots social action initiatives of short duration being undertaken each year has seen a seventy-fold increase over this period, surpassing 100,000 in total and being carried out in a diversity of cultural, social, and economic contexts—from small towns and villages in the West to large urban centers in Africa and Asia.
“The supreme need of humanity is cooperation and reciprocity. The stronger the ties of fellowship and solidarity amongst men, the greater will be the power of constructiveness and accomplishment in all the planes of human activity. ”
—‘Abdu’l-Bahá
A major factor propelling this progress has been the emergence of a global network of some 330 national and regional training institutes. Functioning in virtually every country, these institutes offer courses that assist individuals to draw insights from the Bahá’í writings and advance in their capacity to contribute to the betterment of their communities. In tens of thousands of localities, through their involvement in these institute courses, groups of people from all walks of life are engaged in a participatory process of study, action, and reflection aimed at enhancing the spiritual and material lives of their communities. A natural outcome of this process of capacity building has been a further multiplication of community-based initiatives and greater collaboration among a range of actors, as they strive to advance various aspects of community life. Still modest when considering the magnitude of the challenges that lie ahead, the collective endeavor underway in various parts of the world offers early glimpses of how individuals, communities, and institutions, can work together to re-create the world around them in light of spiritual principles.
Integral to this rise in activity over the years has been an evolving process of learning about development. The ongoing efforts of Bahá’í institutions and agencies at various levels to foster and support action, reflection on action, study, and consultation, and to systematize the accumulating body of experience, has gradually given rise to a broad framework for collective learning that guides the efforts of the worldwide Bahá’í community in the field of social action. This framework will continue to evolve in the decades and centuries ahead, as peoples in diverse settings take charge of their spiritual, social, and material development and generate new knowledge about the path towards a prosperous future.
