Samir Panjwani Joins AKA, Mombasa

Samir has joined us AKA, Mombasa as a consultant sponsored through the Canadian government (CADEX) and Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) Canada, specialising in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) for the Academies network. Over the course of this consultancy, he will be working to establish systems by which we can better track and analyse data pertaining to various areas of interest pertinent to student success.

Samir has come to the Academies with experience in education and development in Central and South Asia. His first encounter with the Academies was as a consultant in 2009, where he worked with a team of volunteers to investigate a number of market research questions.

Since that time, Samir has been involved in education, rural development, and monitoring & evaluation in a variety of capacities. Samir was a William J. Clinton Fellow with the American India Foundation, during which time he initially conducted a scoping exercise on high performing government schools in India and subsequently helped develop teacher capacity in a remote, private school. Samir then began working with the Institute for Professional Development (IPD) in Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan – a government education agency supported by the Aga Khan Foundation Tajikistan – initially to help scale up IPD’s Early Childhood Development programme and then to help formulate IPD’s overall, six-year organizational strategy. Samir also worked with AKF Badakhshan, Afghanistan as the Programme Management Support Officer in rural development and later as a consultant with AKF Afghanistan in donor relations and grants development.

Most recently, Samir served as a qualitative research consultant with Coffey International Development in the UK looking at barriers to girls’ education in nine countries deemed to be “fragile states”. He joins us after having completed an MA this past September in Poverty and Development from the Institute of Development Studies in the UK.

Welcome, Samir! We look forward to working closely with you.