In keeping with the ethic of intellectual pursuit, AKDN currently operates over 300 pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools across Asia and Africa. A new initiative is establishing around twenty means-blind, merit-based, Academies of Excellence that will concentrate resources on educating and developing a new cadre of leaders in the developing world.

In higher education, the Aga Khan University (AKU) and University of Central Asia address key professional gaps in the areas of medicine, nursing, teaching, and continuing education. Over the last 25 years, AKU has established programs and campuses in eight countries as far afield as East Africa and Europe. It has emerged as a premier institution of higher learning in the developing world. A faculty of arts and sciences at AKU will soon provide undergraduate and graduate degrees in a broad range of disciplines beyond medicine and education.

Catalyzing Economies

AKDN’s social programs are complemented by economic enterprises which it operates in collaboration with local and international development partners. The Network invests in fragile or post-conflict economies with an eye to development, but project companies are expected to make a profit over time.

In Afghanistan, AKDN established Roshan, a GSM mobile telephone service provider. Now recognized as the premier mobile phone operator in the country, it is the largest employer outside of government. It has over 1.2 million subscribers. Roshan has connected Afghans to one another, facilitated commerce and enabled economic progress.

In West Africa, AKDN helped to create a regional airline, establishing vital air links – a critical component of the transport infrastructure in a region where roads are impassable much of the year. Whereas it once took over 18 hours with a stopover in Paris to travel between Bamako, Mali and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, it now takes only a few hours, and costs much less. These new transport links have facilitated commerce and enabled economic progress across the two countries.

Inspired by the social conscience of Islam and united by a vision to enable people, their communities, and their economies to progress together, AKDN has worked for over fifty years to foster a sustainable legacy of development and is a living example of the transformational power of the social conscience of Islam.

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TAUFIQ RAHIM and QAHIR DHANANI are students in the Graduate Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.