Aga Khan

He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on 13 December 1936. He was educated for nine years at the Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and then at Harvard University, where he read Islamic history and graduated with a BA cum laude in 1959. He succeeded his grandfather as Imam in 1957, at the age of twenty.

He founded the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of more than 200 affiliated agencies employing some 80,000 staff and working on health, education, culture and rural development across Africa, South and Central Asia and the Middle East.

The Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) was set up in 1983 to act as a catalyst for rural development by supporting local communities directly. It works in more than 3,000 villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra and states that it has affected the lives of more than 3.5 million people. More than 80 per cent of the households it works with belong to marginalised communities, including tribal people, dalits and minorities, and more than 60 per cent of those it reaches are women. Its work covers agriculture and climate resilience, work and enterprise, and the building of community institutions for financial inclusion, livelihoods and rural governance.

He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2015. He was made an Honorary Companion of the Order of Canada in 2005, and received many other national and international honours for his work in architecture, education and philanthropy.[2][3][4]