IB and the Aga Khan Development Network
The IB and the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) started to work together in 2008, a collaboration that was celebrated when His Highness the Aga Khan delivered the Peterson Lecture entitled “Global education and the developing world” at North Atlanta High School, Atlanta, USA. The AKDN includes a number of flagship Aga Khan Academies. The AKDN first academy opened in Mombasa, Kenya in 2003, and will eventually include academies in countries in Africa, South and Central Asia, and the Middle East, where high quality education is often in short supply. The academies will be open to motivated students regardless of background or ability to pay.
Most recently, the IB took part in a project in Zanzibar, Tanzania to bring together teachers from diverse IB World Schools and backgrounds to develop teacher resource materials with Muslim history and cultures as a context. A group of IB teachers, IB staff, the academic director for the Aga Khan Academies and two members of the future Aga Khan University in Dar es Salaam, worked together to share planners and units of work and refine them by gaining feedback from each other.
This project reflects one way to model how an increased awareness and understanding of a specific cultural context can enhance the curriculum resources provided in IB World Schools to better serve our students and teachers.
