Aga Khan Education Services (AKES) currently operates more than 300 schools and advanced educational programmes that provide quality pre-school, primary, secondary, and higher secondary education services to students in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Kenya ,the Kyrgyz Republic, Uganda, Tanzania, and Tajikistan.

Introduction

The Ismaili Imamat has a long tradition of leadership in educational development. The foundations of the present system were laid by Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan, III, who established over 200 schools during the first half of the 20th century, the first in 1905 in Mundra and Gwadur in India and another in Zanzibar, followed by more schools in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, India, Pakistan and Syria (a number of schools were subsequently nationalised following independence). Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah also supported the development of institutions of higher education in India, and North and East Africa.

Today, the Aga Khan Education Services (AKES) is one of six agencies of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) supporting activities in the field of education. The other three are the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), the Aga Khan University (AKU), the University of Central Asia, the Aga Khan Academies and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC).

AKES currently operates more than 300 schools and advanced educational programmes that provide quality pre-school, primary, secondary, and higher secondary education services to more than 54,000 students in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Tajikistan. AKES is also developing new schools in Kyrgyzstan and Madagascar and studying the feasibility of services and facilities in Mozambique.

Programmes to improve educational quality have been built into the AKES system since the early-1980s. Field-based teacher training was launched in Pakistan's Northern Areas in 1983. School improvement experiments began at the same time in Sindh province in Pakistan, where AKES introduced child-centred teaching methods, and in Tanzania, where new techniques for secondary school teaching in English, mathematics, and science were implemented in Dar es Salaam. AKES, Kenya has been the Development Network pioneer in the use of computers in the classroom, while many Network initiatives in pre-school education began in AKES, India.