Aga Khan Foundation
private international development agency
The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) is a private, not-for-profit international development agency, which was founded in 1967 by Shah Karim Al Hussaini, Aga Khan IV, the 49th Hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims. AKF seeks to provide long-term solutions to problems of poverty, hunger, illiteracy and ill health in the poorest parts of South and Central Asia, Eastern and Western Africa, and the Middle East. In these regions, the needs of rural communities in mountainous, coastal and resource poor areas are given particular attention. The Foundation's activities often reinforce the work of other sister agencies within the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). While these agencies are guided by different mandates pertaining to their respective fields of expertise (the environment, culture, microfinance, health, education, architecture, rural development), their activities are often coordinated with one another in order to "multiply" the overall effect that the Network has in any given place or community. AKF also collaborates with local, national and international partners in order to bring about sustainable improvements of life in the 14 countries in which it implements programmes. The Foundation's head office is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Areas of focus
The Foundation has seven areas of focus that include: early childhood development, education, health and nutrition, agriculture and food security, civil society, work and enterprise, and climate resilience. Seeking innovative approaches to complex problems, it tries to identify solutions that can be adapted to conditions in many different regions and replicated.
Cross-cutting issues that are also addressed by the Foundation include human resource development, community participation, and gender and development.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q389818. VIAF identifies the subject as 159342215. The Library of Congress control number is n83041477. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aga Khan Foundation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.