Situated architecture and design requires engagement with local stakeholders who can articulate the nuances of these and other foundational issues. The Harvard University Graduate School of Design's (GSD) move to digital teaching due to Covid-19 only exacerbated that need. GSD students collaborated with the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH), which recently began work in Afghanistan. "With the help of AKAH, we accessed more stakeholders remotely than we ever would have if we had just visited the site," a student says. A crucial - and perhaps the most special - relationship AKAH helped facilitate was a partnership between the GSD students and both faculty and students from Kabul University. The Afghan institution selected eight students to partner with their Harvard peers, which allowed the latter to have collaborators directly embedded in the area.
In Afghanistan, despite the lockdown in major population centres, the number of cases has continued to surge upwards. In March 2020, the Ministry of Public Health and the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, started collaborating to jointly develop and in May 2020 their synergy resulted in the creation of an ActivityInfo, an information management system used to manage data related to Covid-19 response, that linked 34 provinces of Afghanistan with the Crisis Coordination Centre in Kabul.
An online panel discussion exploring experiences and techniques in green and environmentally sensitive building and design in South and Central Asia.
The rehabilitation of two summer camps in the villages of Barrushan and Anjin in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO), Tajikistan serving as a potential quarantine or treatment centre, were successfully completed by the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH). Serving as an additional treatment facility for Covid-19 patients, "these rehabilitated summer camps are now fully equipped to cater for 50 to 70 coronavirus patients at a time", says Laylo Shogunbekova, AKAH project Manager. To enhance joint and coordinated response efforts, AKAH, the Aga Khan Foundation Tajikistan, and the GBAO Regional Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the mutual usage of these summer camps.
The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) in Pakistan, which pioneered disaster management and response in the region, has trained over 50,000 community volunteers, including women and youth.
The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat has trained over 50,000 local volunteers in Pakistan in community-based disaster risk management.
A project, from the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) that combines satellite images, mapping technologies and the local knowledge of villagers to help build climate-proof settlements in disaster-prone areas of Pakistan recently won an international award organized by the United Nations housing agency (UN-Habitat). "It's not just responding to the effects of the climate emergency, but being proactive in protecting people from its effects, using technology and the knowledge of communities," said David Ireland, Chief Executive of World Habitat. AKAH plans to extend the model to other rural parts of Pakistan, while its projects in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Syria and India are also using this approach, and have completed risk assessments in nearly 2,500 villages covering 3 million people.