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November 14, 1978

Your Excellencies, Your Worship, Honorable Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen.

In more senses than one, the sun has shone on this, our first formal visit to British Columbia and to its beautiful capital, Vancouver. My wife and I have traveled extensively in recent years and I can honestly say that I cannot recollect any country nor any city which has welcomed us so warmly, so kindly and so generously as Vancouver. (applause)

In Islam, the Holy Quran offers explicit direction to share resources beyond one?s requirements, and to care for the poor and those in need. The injunction to service is the ethical underpinning of the work of the Aga Khan Development Network. It drives its efforts to build the intellectual capital and institutions needed to address the problems of our world today. An example is the Global Centre for Pluralism which we have recently founded in partnership with the Government of Canada.

ngaging with one another to build mutual understanding and appreciation across our differences, the kind of dialogue which is at the heart of pluralism, must continue. There are important lessons to be learnt from the past year as the pandemic has transformed our societies and our institutions.

The struggle to survive brought some immediate results – many with more than short-term consequences. I will give just two examples. The-cut off of imported and subsidised fuel led to the massive cutting of trees and shrubs to provide heat during the bitterly cold winters. Herds of livestock, once a major export, were decimated for food in the absence of alternatives.

There was a time when male and female teachers could not get to the school because the students could not get to the school because they had no shoes to walk in the snow. And all through these terrible times of poverty, professional men and women did everything they could to sustain the educational system of Badakshan. I think therefore that it is appropriate that at the beginning of this speech I should pay My compliments

n recent years there has been an absolute revolution in education. This revolution in education is driven by a number of new concepts. First of all communications, the capacity to bring education through the new electronic networks to the most isolated parts of our globe. The second one is the extraordinary volume of knowledge which each individual has to absorb during his or her lifetime. And therefore the necessity for continuing education.

Video of Statement by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan at the Press Conference held in Beirut, Lebanon
11 October 1978

May I say first of all, my mission in Beirut is limited in time and in scope.
I have been sent here by the Secretary-General in connection with the hostilities in Beirut in the hope that the visit might contribute to the cessation of bloodshed. Now that we have a ceasefire, although a very fragile one, I am hoping that my visit here and the talks I had today, will contribute in a modest way to the consolidation of that ceasefire.

ISLAMABAD: The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, the Ministry of Climate Change, Pakistan, World Habitat Awards and the United Nations Habitat Programme, co-organized an international virtual seminar on Ecosystem Restoration for Quality of Life.

The seminar was attended by representatives from the Ministry of Climate Change, the United Nations, INGOs, Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) agencies and partners, donor agencies, academia, media and community organizations. The virtual seminar, held Tuesday, was part of a series of official events celebrating World Environment Day (WED).

True regime change occurs when liberty is guaranteed by a people free to create or support institutions of their own choosing. True regime change occurs when that strength and that freedom are defined by the depth, breadth and quality of education shared across the society in question.

Students of world history remind us how Central Asia, a thousand years ago, led the world in cultural and intellectual achievements. This region is where medicine was founded, where algebra got its name, where the earth's diameter was precisely calculated, where some of the world's greatest poetry was penned. This happened because the societies were open to new ideas, open to change, open to scholars and people from many backgrounds. That kind of openness can again unlock the doors to the future, and allows us to take on the great questions of our time and place.

However, a measure of a university's success is the quality of the education it delivers and the careers of its graduates. This starts with the recruitment of students, for without good students, a university will never achieve excellence. A key ingredient in this story has been our open-access philosophy, enabling us to enrol students on merit alone, with the vast majority of students receiving financial support. The result is that 70 percent of our students are from small towns and rural areas, and half are women