The insights that gave rise to what came to be known as the moraisean Large Group Capacitation Method (LGCM) were an unanticipated consequence of a 30-day course, in 1954, for a large group of the Northeast Region, Brazil Peasant Leagues' middle-level leadership to study Brazilian Agrarian reform law. The group met under clandestine conditions at a family home normally accommodating 7 people, in a heavily policed part of Recife (Brazil). Through the early 1960s de Morais staged workshops of an experimental character throughout the northeast of Brazil. After he was forced into exile following the 1964 coup d'état, he worked as ILO Agrarian Reform Regional Advisor for Central America, and later under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), he was able to launch a multitude of 'Experimental Laboratories' (later called Organization Workshops in the Southern Africa version of the method). From 1973 he applied the emerging method to peasants' capacitation within the Agrarian reform Program of Honduras: over three years more than 200 workshops took place, with participation of more than 24000 peasants and government officers from around the region. Over the years de Morais worked as consultant and/or director with the UNDP, FAO, and Catholic Relief Services. Elsewhere the OW has been sponsored by Hivos, Norwegian People's Aid, terre des hommes, Concern Worldwide, Redd Barna and, recently e.g. in South Africa, the Seriti Institute, Soul City Institute and government departments such as South Africa's Department of Social Development. The OW, in a variety of local, regional and national applications, and in different formats, has spread, over the years, to Costa Rica, Mexico, Panamá, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, the Caribbean, a number of African countries as well as Europe.