Aga Khan Foundation

AKF home

Facts at a glance

Health

Education

Rural development

Civil Society

Environment

Current Projects

Scholarships

Cross-cutting issues

Prospective grantees

Other AKDN agencies

Rss

Scholarship Programme News

ISP alumnus visits AKF Geneva
Zubair Kassam (ISP 03-04), Head of the English Department at the Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa, visited the Aga Khan Foundation office in Geneva with 10 students from the Academy who had been invited to Geneva by the Earth Focus Foundation. Earth Focus is continuing the work with young people that was started by the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan’s Bellerive Foundation. It aims to encourage and promote students’ understanding of the environment and sustainable development by empowering them to feel they have a role in helping to create a better world. While in Geneva, the students visited various international organisations and participated in a debate on environmental rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an event that included students from schools in Geneva as well as the students from Mombasa (View photograph).

New books by ISP alumni
The Aga Khan Foundation is proud to announce that four ISP alumni published books within the past several months. They are:

Rafiq Dossani (ISP 79-80), a senior research scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, published India Arriving: How This Economic Powerhouse is Redefining Global Business, AMACOM Books, November 30, 2007. This book is about the changing India, which, after centuries of social and economic stagnation, is charting a unique role for services in economic growth. India is maturing as a nation while at the same time remaining pluralistic. Rafiq holds that given India’s size, the implications for the rest of the world are important.

Pallavi Aiyar’s (ISP 00-02) new book Smoke and Mirrors: China Through Indian Eyes was published in April 2008 by Harper Collins. The following is a quote from India Today’s review of her book:

“In 2002, Pallavi Aiyar turned her back on a promising future in media and went to China in pursuit of love: her Spanish boyfriend, whom she had met at the London School of Economics, was based in Beijing and persuaded her to join him. Two hundred years ago, he told her, Napoleon had prophesied that once the sleeping dragon awakened, the world would tremble, The dragon had woken up, he murmured, so make your move. It was a fortuitous decision: in time she married the man and stayed on to become an award-winning foreign correspondent – the only Chinese-speaking Indian journalist in China for more than five years. Smoke and Mirrors is by far the most well-informed and entertaining account of life in the Middle Kingdom by an Indian in recent years.”

Seema Alavi’s book, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600-1900, described above, is published by Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, 2007.

Tom Olali’s (ISP 00-03) new book is Performance of a Swahili Poem During the Lamu Maulidi Festival. To learn more about the Hamziyyah, the Swahili poem that eulogises the Prophet Mohammad.

Dissertations by ISP graduates
Saira Jamal (ISP 02-06), “Leaving My Mother’s House: Khoja Ismaili Women and University”, PhD in Transpersonal Psychology, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, California, April 26, 2007.

This study explores the relationship between mothers and daughters as the young women prepare to leave home for university. The stories of the women displays various levels of their bicultural history. The findings suggest some similarities of this group with women from mainstream culture, as well as some interesting differences.

Sima Eshkoor (ISP 04-07), a thesis on Basal Cell Carcinoma, the most common cancer among skin cancers, MSc, Universiti Putra Malaysia, December 2007.

More Alumni News
In recognition of the achievements of Indian women in the field of social development, the Government of India has instituted a number of national awards called Stree Shakti Puraskar. The awards carry a cash prize and a citation, and are given to women who have triumphed over difficult circumstances and have worked for the support and rehabilitation of women and children in distress. Pinki Virani (ISP 79-82), an Indian journalist and author, has been conferred the Stree Shakti Puraskar on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2008. The award was presented by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi in acknowledgement of Pinki’s book “Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India” and her activism in child protection following the publication of the book. “Bitter Chocolate” is being used by parents and teachers in schools and colleges and by lawyers and doctors to raise awareness about the urgent social problem of child abuse in Indian society. Pinki Virani’s other two non-fiction books are “Aruna’s Story” and “Once Was Bombay”, pioneering works in gender and human rights.

Tom Olali (ISP 2000-03) from Kenya, obtained his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2004. Sahel Publishing in Indiana recently published his book entitled "An English Rendition of a Classical Swahili Poem", and another volume entitled "Performance of a Swahili Poem During the Lamu Maulidi Festival" is to come out shortly. Tom is a full time Lecturer at the University of Nairobi and also collaborates with the National Museums of Kenya on research on Swahili and Islamic Civilization. At present he is a visiting scholar at Tianjin Normal University in China where he is teaching Swahili and Swahili Civilization.

Zamila Karimi (ISP 80-82), has a professional degree in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Interior Design from the University of Georgia. Zamila was selected to present her creation “Encounters: exploring the element of time” at the March 5-8, 2008 Annual Interior Design Educators Council conference in Montreal. The jury selected her work because of its aesthetic and conceptual achievement. According to her website, Zamila uses elements, such as earth, water, fire and air, to investigate the changing nature of the space and time within the context of contemporary environment. Her installations reflect the use of traditional geometrical forms and patterns found in Islamic art and architecture juxtaposed against natural materials and contemporary art mediums. She creates installations that echo simplicity within a complex narrative that is very personal.

ISP alumnus joins AKF Geneva Office
AKF Geneva is happy to welcome Al-Nasir Hamir (ISP 00-02) who joined the office in January 2008 as Assistant Manager. Al-Nasir has an MA degree in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and has been working for the last five years as an energy and infrastructure consultant in Washington, DC. Al-Nasir is not new to the Aga Khan Foundation since he was a development intern at the Washington office for nine months in 1999-2000. We welcome him back to the Foundation and wish him much satisfaction in his new job.

ISP visitors in Geneva
Dr. Nasreen Dhanani (ISP 89-92) and Latif Jina (ISP 02-04), who are both working at the University of Central Asia (UCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, visited the Aga Khan Foundation Geneva office in November 2007 for meetings. Nasreen, who is Deputy Director of UCA, was kind enough to give a brown-bag presentation to Geneva staff about the current work of the new university and its future plans. The School of Professional and Continuing Education is already up and running with courses in Business, Information Technology, English Language and Mountain Tourism. Construction of the university’s three campuses in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan will be starting shortly and a faculty development programme is in place. Latif, who is Manager of Special Programmes at UCA, is very much involved in this last endeavour. The first degree programmes offered by the university will be two-year Master’s degrees, after which an undergraduate programme will be started at all three campuses. For more information about UCA, you may wish to consult the UCA website.

Karim Alibhai (ISP 82-84) visited the office in December. Karim has a long history of working with AKDN, first when he set up a biogas project at the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in India in the 1980’s and later as the Director of the Water and Sanitation Extension Programme in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. He is currently Regional Director for Asia with the Canadian Hunger Foundation.

More news