The Aga Khan University strives to set the regional standard of excellence at its hospitals and clinics in Pakistan, East Africa and Afghanistan, which treat more than two million patients in a typical year, and which have provided reduced-cost treatment to more than six million lower-income patients over the last 35 years. The Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi and the Aga Khan University Hospital, Nairobi were the first hospitals in their countries to meet the rigorous accreditation standards of the US-based Joint Commission International, and their clinical laboratories were the first hospital-based laboratories in their countries accredited by the US-based College of American Pathologists.

AKU’s academic health centres provide high-quality treatment backed by the latest knowledge and deliver an array of services unavailable elsewhere. Our highly trained staff provide everything from prenatal courses for expectant mothers to neurosurgery, child psychiatry to comprehensive cancer care, nutritional counselling to kidney transplantation. In addition to offering outstanding care to those in need, AKU’s hospitals actively work to prevent illness by educating their patients and the public.

At AKU, we believe that everyone should have access to quality care, regardless of where they live or their income. In Pakistan, more than 70 percent of patients who visit the University Hospital every year are low- or middle-income. A pregnant woman saved from death after doctors elsewhere had given up hope; an infant girl who received emergency surgery to correct a life-threatening lung malformation; a young boy whose cancer was detected and successfully treated after his parents had exhausted their savings pursuing treatment at other hospitals – these are just a few instances in which AKU’s commitment to providing access to world-class care regardless of a patient’s ability to pay has made the difference between life and death.