The five-fold purpose of the International Conferences was:

1. offering humble thanksgiving to the Divine Author of our Faith, Who has graciously enabled His followers, during a period of deepening anxiety and amidst the confusion and uncertainties of a critical phase in the fortunes of mankind,
2. to prosecute uninterruptedly the Ten-Year Plan formulated for the execution of the Grand Design conceived by 'Abdu'l-Bahá,
3. of reviewing and celebrating the series of signal victories won so rapidly in the course of each of the campaigns of this world-encircling Crusade,
4. of deliberating on ways and means that will insure its triumphant consummation,
5. and of lending simultaneously a powerful impetus, the world over, to the vital process of individual conversion -the preeminent purpose underlying the Plan in all its ramifications - and to the construction and completion of the three Mother Temples to be built in the European, the African, and Australian continents. [CBN No 94 Nov 1957 p1]

On August 5, 1969, the wheels of our plane touched down at Entebbe airport, Kampala, Uganda—at last the long-promised visit of Amatu’l-Bahá to the believers of Africa was commencing. In 1961, at the time when she dedicated the Mother Temple of Africa for public worship, Rúḥíyyih Khánum promised the friends to come back and really visit them, touring as many Centres as possible. After nine years, this has now been fulfilled. [BW15p594]

It was the start of a four-leg journey that took the Hand of the Cause to 34 African countries, travelling 36,000 miles, addressing 40,000 people including 19 heads of state in some 400 gatherings. Beginning her Safari in East Africa, she crossed the whole breadth of the continent to the Gambia, turned back to the center of the Congo, and went down to the tip of South Africa in Cape Town before returning to East Africa. She met nineteen Heads of State among them Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, President Hamani Diori of Niger, President Dr. William V.S Tubman of Liberia, King Motlotletlehi Sobhuza II of Swaziland, President Gregoire Kayibanda of Rwanda, and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia.

The programme drew on the learning of three decades of experience of FUNDAEC (Fundación para la Aplicación y Enseñanza de las Ciencias), in Columbia. It was an approach to social and economic development that addressed both the material and the spiritual dimensions of human existence. The programme aimed at assisting youth to understand certain concepts, learn a range of relevant facts, and acquire certain qualities, attitudes and skills that would enable them to promote the well-being of their people in fields as diverse as health, education, the environment, secondary production and community organization.