The University of Central Asia, the world’s first university dedicated exclusively to education and research on mountain regions and societies, has been launched by the Aga Khan Foundation and will be built in Khorog city. Khorog is the administrative centre of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast of Tajikistan. On 31 August, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, the Aga Khan, and the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, signed a treaty to establish the university. The signing followed similar ceremonies in Dushanbe and Bishkek earlier, where the Aga Khan signed the treaty with President Emomali Rahmonov of Tajikistan and President Askar Akaev of the Kyrgyz Republic respectively.

The University of Central Asia will be a private, autonomous, not-for-profit, international institution of higher education focusing on interdisciplinary teaching and research in development issues affecting mountain societies and the needs of peoples and cultures of mountain region across Central Asia and elsewhere.

Almost thirty million people, many of who seek their livelihoods along the Silk Route, on the earth’s highest mountain ranges stretching from Western China to the Southern Caucasus, will benefit from the new university. With its location where the Altai, Tien Shan, Pamir, Karakorum, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges converge, the University will serve people in the mountainous parts of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, and countries in South Asia.

Over the past quarter-century, the AKDN has initiated educational programmes and institutions in the developing and developed worlds in collaboration with Harvard University, the Karolinska Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGill University, McMaster University, the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto, among others. An international commission of mountain experts, academicians and regional specialists that included CACI Chairman Dr. S. Frederick Starr, recommended the establishment of the university. The University will help turn the mountains that divide the nations and territories of Central Asia into the links that unite its peoples and economies in a shared endeavour to improve their future wellbeing. The university’s charter, academic standards, curricula, faculty and students, academic partnerships and linkages will be international.

The University will not include a faculty of theology. The University will emphasize distance learning, the use of information and computer technologies, and create satellite facilities and programs across the region. Students, faculty and staff will be recruited on merit. The first programs will be in Continuing Education to upgrade professional skills. English will be the primary medium of instruction in the post-graduate and graduate programs. The post-graduate program will foster research on issues critical to sustainable development such as geology of mountains and mining, hydrology, seismology, mountain ecology, natural resource management, high-altitude agriculture and development economics. An interdisciplinary residential undergraduate program will cover a wide range of subjects such as forestry, environmental engineering, disaster management, agronomy, civil engineering, mining, energy, computer sciences, economics, business, accounting, sociology, regional languages, anthropology, history, philosophy and ethics.

Konstantin Parshin, Dushanbe, Tajikistan