Aga Khan Foundation

The goal of the Foundation's health programme is to achieve sustainable improvements in health status among vulnerable groups, especially the geographically remote, women of childbearing age and children under five.

The Foundation promotes improvements in health policies, financing mechanisms and basic services while enabling communities to adopt effective health practices.

The Foundation promotes improvements in health policies, financing mechanisms and basic services while enabling communities to adopt effective health practices. In the past, deficiencies in health policy, financing and service availability undermined attempts to achieve lasting improvements in health status among poor communities. Free-standing, community-based health programmes supported by the Foundation and other donors succeeded in achieving health improvements for a limited time at a relatively low cost. However, communities often did not have the financial resources to sustain improvements, the quality of care and patient referral were not assured, and basic services were often inaccessible and rarely equitable or lasting.

The Foundation now supports interventions that build the institutional capacity of health systems by:

Strengthening and developing partnerships between all stakeholders from the state to the community;
Promoting policy dialogue and mechanisms to develop and sustain health systems and services;
Documenting and disseminating best practices.

Health is more than health care. While the Foundation works to strengthen health systems and services, it also promotes initiatives that offer people the knowledge and skills to avoid illness. These measures include educating women and girls and enabling families to adopt appropriate hygiene practices. In addition, the Foundation supports testing and implementation of income-generating strategies that allow households and communities to acquire better nutrition and health status. Increased income enables communities to improve nutritional status, particularly that of women and children, and to build and maintain water and sanitation systems.

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