In Kyrgyz Republic, AKF works closely with parents and caregivers to promote cognitive, social and physical development of children through its Reading for Children and Care for Child Development programmes.
AKDN / Jean-Luc Ray
In Kyrgyz Republic, AKF works closely with parents and caregivers to promote cognitive, social and physical …
AKDN / Jean-Luc Ray
Primary School in Mukuru, Kenya. In over 25 countries, AKDN is working to ensure that all children, regardless of gender, ethnicity or circumstance, have opportunities to thrive in their early years and beyond.
AKDN / Lucas Cuervo Moura
Primary School in Mukuru, Kenya. In over 25 countries, AKDN is working to ensure that all children, …
AKDN / Lucas Cuervo Moura
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Our programmes reached 964,000 learners in 2022
Worldwide, about 258 million children and adolescents are still not in school today. Of those enrolled, approximately 617 million fail to achieve basic learning proficiencies each year. About 62 percent of the world’s youth who cannot read or write are girls, underlying the ongoing gender and equity disparities in delivering quality education for all.
The Aga Khan Foundation is committed to collaborating with government and civil society partners to equip girls, boys, and young adults with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed to help them interact effectively with the world and become contributing members of society. We currently work in Afghanistan, India, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Portugal, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania and Uganda.
This includes increasing access to quality and secure learning opportunities, accelerating progress of holistic and relevant learning outcomes, and strengthening delivery of inclusive and pluralistic learning systems.
In 2022, our programmes reached 964,000 learners in 7,700 schools and learning spaces. We worked with 27,000 teachers and school heads, and gave 35,000 parents and caregivers training to support children’s learning.
AKDN / Lucas Cuervo Moura
Education Improvement Programme
Our pre-tertiary education improvement programme approach is defined by identified school systems. It spans the minimum 10-year timeframe necessary to facilitate sustainable outcomes. The programme focuses on a select number of schools at any given time, and then works with a subset of these schools to develop sustainable and scalable models about 'what works' to improve holistic learning outcomes. Once models are identified, we work with governments and other partners to scale them to other schools.
Our education programmes improve access to learning by being gender responsive and focusing on increasing the visibility of gender gaps. We establish partnerships to respond to the needs of working at scale. We design innovative gender-responsive programming that incorporates health and nutrition initiatives, develops employable skills and enhances the role of civil society in enabling girls to complete a full cycle of quality education.
We support holistic and relevant learning outcomes by focusing on enhancing learners’ curiosity, imagination, resilience and capacity to respect and care about their well-being and that of their friends, families, communities and planet. A flagship initiative that seeks to improve the holistic learning outcomes for some of the world's most marginalised learners is Schools2030, a ten-year participatory learning improvement programme based in 1,000 government schools across ten countries.
Pluralism and ethics are critical lenses through which we approach our work with education systems. We work with governments and other partners to create new solutions, tools and resources. These include technologies to strengthen the professional competencies of teachers, school leaders and education officials. We also collaborate with partners to inspire education policy reform, strengthen evidence-based approaches to learning improvement and enable leadership capacity development at scale.
UCA
Universities Improvement
In collaboration with the University of Central Asia and the Aga Khan University, we are implementing a universities improvement programme to increase the quality of tertiary educational institutions. This initiative supports efforts to improve governance, master plans, faculty development, curriculum quality, specific priority facilities and internal systems. The current focus is on four priority institutions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic.