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Happy New Year from the Aga Khan Academies

Dear friends of the Aga Khan Academies,

Happy New Year to you and your families from all of us at the Aga Khan Academies.

As we look toward 2018, I’m pleased to share with you some of the exciting developments that the Academies are anticipating for the coming year.

Across the Aga Khan Development Network, we will be continuing to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of His Highness the Aga Khan, marking 60 years of his enlightened leadership as the Imam of the Ismaili Muslims and founder of the AKDN. The Jubilee commemorations began on 11 July 2017 and will continue until July 2018. The Aga Khan Academies have been running two social media initiatives in honour of the Diamond Jubilee – Academies ‘Journeys’ and ‘60 Stories for 60 Years’ – and these will continue through this July. I hope you are enjoying them.

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The Jubilee year marks a time of increasing expansion of the Aga Khan Academies. Construction of the full campus for our third Academy in Maputo, Mozambique has proceeded rapidly, and our students and staff are looking forward to the opening of the beautiful new school buildings that will house students from grades 3–7 in the very near future. The Academy in Maputo also expanded their curricular offering this academic year, having introduced the International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme, which has been received very well by our students and teachers.

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I’m also very pleased to share that our fourth Aga Khan Academy in Dhaka, Bangladesh will begin construction in 2018. The design for the forthcoming Academy won the award for best ‘Future Education’ project at the World Architecture Festival 2017. We’re looking forward to seeing the vision behind the award-winning design come to life, to provide talented students from Bangladesh and the region with a world-class education, regardless of their socioeconomic background.

In 2018 we will also be celebrating 15 years of the Aga Khan Academies network, with our first Academy in Mombasa, Kenya having opened in 2003. During the past 15 years, the Academies have pioneered innovative approaches in a multitude of areas, including the cross-curricular Aga Khan Strands, approaches to leadership development and service learning, campus design for a well-rounded education, talent identification, and developing local teachers into IB practitioners, amongst others. As our network grows, we are continuing to see the power of becoming a global, closely integrated and pluralistic learning community that allows sharing of ideas, expertise and thinking across varied contexts and cultures.

We greatly value your support for the Aga Khan Academies and our collective effort towards creating a better future through education.

Wishing you and your families the very best for 2018.

Warm regards,

Salim A.L. Bhatia
Director of Academies

Junior School celebrates International Dot Day

AKA Maputo PDC celebrates 10 years

Community Service

Community service is an overarching and major facet of student education and experience at the Academies. Incorporated into student life and the curriculum, community service extends the educational experience beyond the classroom, informing students of the real-world implications of their studies. Through community projects with local organisations and groups, students gain a sense of the interconnectedness of their education with the world around them.

Students can participate in a variety of structured community initiatives and internships to learn about their place in the world.

By partnering with local Aga Khan Development Network agencies, students learn first-hand about the operations of an organisation and work towards making tangible contributions to the agencies.

In addition, community engagement provides an understanding of broad concepts such as human rights, dignity and autonomy, while emphasising the ethos of leaving the world a better place.

Examples of service projects from the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa:

Coast Rural Support Programme: Tree planting at Mtaa community reservoir. The reservoir was created as a community project. The outreach project involved planting 700 indigenous seedlings around the reservoir.

East African Quality in Early Learning: Creation of the Fun Reading Day initiative to promote early grade reading. Inspired by the common 1:10 ratio of students to books in local public primary schools, the first project was to collect books to establish a library at Ng’ombeni Primary School. Through a book drive and other community projects, students collected books and catalogued and prepared them for library use.

Our Junior School and Diploma Programme (DP) students visited the Ng’ombeni Primary School for group reading sessions. This project was then handed over to upcoming DP students to continue.

Education for Marginalised Children in Kenya (EMACK): Student’s council training workshop at Longo Primary School. Sarrah Sheikh came to know the Longo Primary School through her summer placement service. She went on to assist EMACK in establishing student leadership bodies, beginning with Longo Primary School. Topics covered went from effective leadership to communication tools, and the difference between prefects and elected student leaders. Three weeks after this project, the Kenyan government announced the phasing out of the prefect system and the introduction of elected student councils.

Madrasa Resource Centre: School painting project at Mpirani Nursery School. After visiting a school in disrepair, the DP students decided that a bright place was needed for the students to learn. They mobilised their fellow students to create bright learning materials and to repaint the school.