The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) is a leading global development organisation working to address the root causes of poverty.
For more than 50 years, they have helped create strong community institutions that support sustainable, locally-driven initiatives to improve the lives of millions of people.
Rooted in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, their staff have unique insights into the complex challenges people face today as well as the opportunities for tomorrow. By combining local knowledge with global best practices, they strive to bring about transformative and long-lasting improvements to quality of life. Taking a generational approach, AKF has built the trust required to do this work even in the most fragile contexts.
Thematic Areas and Objectives
They lead a range of integrated, innovative and gender sensitive interventions in agriculture and food security; civil society; climate resilience; early childhood development; education; health and nutrition; and work and enterprise.
Their interventions are informed by evidence, data, local knowledge and extensive networks of community-led institutions. Their activities are coordinated not only with those of other AKDN agencies but also with local, national and international partners in order to bring to bear a full package of multiple activities that can spark a long-term process of positive change.
In addition, they often play a convening, partnership development, policy dialogue and resource mobilisation role for AKDN and its agencies.
Geographic Areas of Focus
The majority of their activities are concentrated in rural communities in mountainous, coastal and other remote, resource-poor areas. While they continue critical work in rural contexts, they have increasingly expanded their programming to include issues of globalisation, migration, climate change and the challenges faced by migrant communities in urban contexts.
They operate in Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Kenya, the Kyrgyz Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, Pakistan, Portugal, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania and Uganda. They also have offices in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, focusing primarily on resource mobilisation and public outreach. Their headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.
Learning and Evaluation
Gathering data on the scale, scope and impact of their programming is an integral part of their efforts to assess, understand their footprint and improve our approaches. Within each project, data is collected to understand the extent to which targets have been met and how communities are experiencing improvements in their lives.
While adapting approaches to local contexts, they make efforts to apply a standard set of global indicators in order to track change and trends over time. When it comes to data management and analysis, they increasingly leverage digital tools such as Salesforce. Evidence generated from results data is shared with partners, communities and other key stakeholders such as governments and civil society. Insights drawn from the data help to inform decision-making, not only internally, for their programming, but also among policymakers and other local actors.
