Aga Khan Foundation USA

Uasin Gishu County Youth Bunge Forum (UGCYB), a community-based organization in Kenya’s Uasin Gishu County, works to support youth employment opportunities and community engagement.

In 2020, as UGCYB sought to meet community needs during the pandemic, they called upon skills developed by participating in the Yetu Initiative’s bootcamp. The Yetu Initiative, a partnership between the Aga Khan Foundation and USAID, hosts bootcamps to build the capacity of local organizations to raise Kenyan resources for Kenyan needs. The bootcamps offer practical training, coaching, mentoring, and peer learning to help organizations successfully launch local fundraising campaigns.

The bootcamp helped UGCYB establish partnerships with corporations and the county government, which allowed them to distribute more than 20,000 masks in low-income areas of their county, including informal settlements. More Information 

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns impacted farmers in the Kyrgyz Republic. Seeds were unavailable at the market because of the closed borders, which prevented almost 25% of farmers from starting the planting season on time. 

Local Impact, a new partnership between the Aga Khan Foundation and USAID, worked with the Kyrgyz Republic’s Ministry of Labor and Social Development (MLSD) to respond to the crisis, collaborating on a vulnerability mapping tool that helped village leaders identify households that needed the most help. AKF and MLSD distributed food supplies and 167 kilograms of winter wheat seeds provided by Local Impact to 874 vulnerable families. AKF also connected the farmers to an agronomist, who shared information with farmers about planting techniques and yield optimization. More Information

As COVID-19 cases spread in Tajikistan, people in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) grew increasingly worried about their health, their finances, and their future. People with COVID-19 symptoms living in this remote and mountainous area had limited accessibility to health centers because of difficult terrain and poor roads.

The Aga Khan Foundation and USAID's Thrive Tajikistan project stepped in to assist by supporting a virtual helpline. The helpline connected community members to healthcare and provided mental health support to both community members and healthcare professionals. Thrive Tajikistan and the Aga Khan Health Services also launched a mobile health initiative with Tcell, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Tajikistan, to reach 1,672 community members with text messages on COVID-19, nutrition, and sanitation. More Information