Lilian Odera, a bona fide leader and advocate of change, is a 2015 alumna of the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa. Born in Kenya and raised in both Kenya and Germany, she speaks English, Swahili and German. Owing to this culturally diverse background, Lilian's parents were prompted to send her to AKA Mombasa, a pluralistic community she could thrive in.

The Academy nurtures future leaders through its unique curriculum and this provided the perfect environment for Lilian to hone her leadership skills. In addition to being an active sportswoman, Lilian served as a House Captain and member of the Student Representative Council. While in her last year of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme, she was awarded the Karen McKellin International Leader of Tomorrow (ILOT) award to study at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The award recognises students with superior academic achievement, leadership skills and involvement in community service.

“I would say my experience at the Academy was like a springboard into my future,” Lilian says of her time at the school. “I had amazing mentors and none of what I achieved would have been possible without their support.”

While at UBC, Lilian continued to pursue opportunities in line with her passion to effect change in the community. She has participated in several community-based projects including organising the first Afrocentrism Conference, which celebrated the identities of people with African descent. The successful event, which pulled in over 500 attendees and raised CAD $60,000, had acclaimed Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o as the keynote speaker. As part of her work as founder and event coordinator for a project that actively involved working with the community around her, she was awarded the prestigious Nestor Korchinsky Student Leadership Award in January 2020. In addition, she also recently marched with the Black Lives Matter movement in Vancouver, Canada. Lilian also won a $5,000 scholarship in 2019 and got into cooperative placement. In a nutshell, her experience at UBC was quite transformative, as she says, “I’m leaving UBC a different woman than I came.”

Although she has graduated with a Bachelor of Media Studies, Lilian is now looking to venture into education. While it is not a career path she imagined, her passion for directly working with people to creatively find solutions to issues is part of the reason she wants to get into education.

“I’ve witnessed how one event, how one change in policy can have a direct impact on how students adapt to new places, develop new relationships and understand themselves and the world around them,” says Lilian. “Although I’ve previously been shy about considering myself a leader, I've come to own that title in part because I've seen the level of trust and confidence people have put in me to execute a project. Being a leader comes with a lot of responsibility and I've never particularly been shy of putting in the work - just witnessing people's reactions, their joy, relief and celebration, is such an amazing reward in itself.”

If there's one lesson from the Academy she has continued to carry with her, it's the importance of being part of a community and working with the community. This has become apparent in all the community-based initiatives she has undertaken ever since leaving the institution.

"As I've grown, I've realised that my continuous involvement with community organisations here in Vancouver is in part influenced by that," Lilian states. "It is through community work that I learn more about myself and the world around me."

So what advice does she have for the young leaders at AKA Mombasa? “It's very easy to be narrowly focused on just grades. Yes, they are important, but life is not measured purely in letter grades. I recommend students seek out adventures and experiences to supplement what they learn in the classroom - whether it's travelling, volunteering at a charity, starting or joining a club. It's important to become holistic and wholesome, to be rich in experience and knowledge.”

My four-year journey at the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa came to a close at a much faster pace than I am comfortable with. With graduation having recently taken place, I can’t help but look back at the immense growth I have undergone personally, socially and intellectually during my time here.

The prospect of joining the Academy had always sat passively on the horizon – I had cousins pass through the Diploma Programme here long before me, and a sister who soon planned to make the shift. So, at the age of 14, it didn’t come as much of a surprise when my parents suggested I move with her.

Leaving the comfort of my home and the company of friends with whom I had spent my entire academic career proved a lot harder than I anticipated. Coming from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I faced less of a culture shock than many incoming students I would interact with over the years, but this didn’t soften the blow of finding myself in the middle of an entirely new education system. Here I was, an anxious teenager who had long since associated learning with the contents of a textbook, now being introduced to criteria, conceptual understanding and inquiry-based learning, all of which seemed like another language to me. Like most who have been in my position, I felt alarmingly overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of responsibility I had to take, both for my learning as an MYP (Middle Years Programme) student, and my well-being as a residential student.

I was lucky enough to have a dorm parent that year who was very perceptive to these challenges, and through her support, and that of several of my class teachers, I was able to integrate relatively seamlessly into life at the Academy. I was particularly struck by the attitude towards learning harboured by my peers, many of whom viewed it as a communal effort and helped me adjust to the new system. This culture of intellectual humility is something that I am honoured to have been able to contribute to over the last 18 months, by tutoring MYP students in subjects I found particularly challenging in the programme.

True to the school’s mandate to develop holistic individuals, I was encouraged to join several extracurricular activities, which empowered me to pursue my passion for learning and service. One of these was a community and service group called Learn and Earn, which operated under the residential programme’s weekend activities. As the coordinator for logistics and communication, I helped organise weekly sessions with students from a nearby school where we carried out activities to promote life skills, as well as sell food items that we had cooked together to raise funds for the renovation of their school’s kitchen. This was my first experience with planning and executing a project of such a scale, and it increased my interactions with members of both the school and the surrounding communities. That same year, I was encouraged by my biology teacher to participate in the 2015 Golden Climate Olympiad where my project on cost-effective biogas digesters earned a silver award.

Two years later, I drew on my experiences as a younger, and newer, student at the Academy to fulfil my role as a Dorm Captain. I have viewed this opportunity as one of my greatest ways of giving back to the community I have grown so much in. In addition to organising orientation activities and events for the residential community, my role has required me to serve as a bridge between the students and the teachers. In considering the perspectives of both parties when discussing administrative issues, I have developed a deeper understanding of the importance of good communication and empathy. By playing a coordinative role, I have been able to engage directly with the sheer diversity of the school community. Interacting with individuals of various backgrounds and opinions has taught me the importance of engaging in open-minded and meaningful dialogue, which has enabled me to broaden my horizons. As a student leader, I have come to appreciate the importance of respect for individuals not because of the authority they hold, but simply because of the fact that they are people, a value that resonates strongly with the Academy’s vision.

Learning to balance these responsibilities and my commitments to other extracurricular programs with the demands of the rigorous International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme has stretched my abilities to manage and organise my time. Most of my courses have involved an extensive amount of critical thinking and have taught me not to look at academic subjects as separate entities. This has in part been catalysed by my Extended Essay on the economic implications of stroke, which focused on biology and economics. As a result, I have been able to make more meaningful conclusions from my learning, and to question things better. I am particularly grateful to my English teacher, whose classes stimulated thoughtful discussions about our world and why things are the way they are. Such platforms have been abundant in my time at the Academy, giving me the opportunity to voice my opinions, take on issues that I am passionate about and to develop a strong social conscience that has helped shape my identity.

As I consider what life will be like after graduation, I find myself saddened by the fact that I will soon be in a new environment without the strong network of support from teachers and students I have built here at the Academy. To these people, and my family of course, I owe not only my intellectual growth but also the strong sense of self I have developed. These are things that I hope to carry with me as I move on to pursue a degree in Global Affairs at Yale University, now with a larger family, concentrated in a region of the world I look very forward to coming back to work in.

By Kamila Janmohamed

Josephine Awino, alumna of the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa, will be attending Wellesley College for her undergraduate studies in environmental science. She shares a reflection on her personal journey at the Academy in which she developed a sense of self and fostered her passions.

I was born in Mombasa, Kenya where my father worked as a photographer and my mother was a housewife. When I was three years old, however, my father died due to a tetanus infection. With no support from anyone in Mombasa, my mother was forced to move back home in Kisumu where the extended family was. Upon moving back, she had no job but still had to find a way to support my family as no one else would. She started farming vegetables at the family farm and sold her produce at the market and that’s how we survived for some time. At that time, farming wasn’t enough to support family needs and many times my family would go without a meal even for a whole day. Despite my mum farming food crops we still ended up having no food many times. I was enrolled at Tido Primary School where my siblings and I were fortunate to get sponsorship from an NGO who were willing to pay for our fees given our performance in class. My mother tried to carter for our uniform and food but she still wasn’t earning enough; when the NGO stopped supporting us educationally, I found myself home due to lack of fees. At that time, my mother wasn’t even able to pay for exam fees and went home without doing exams for the next grade. Coming from this background, where I hated my life and surroundings, I never stopped hoping for a better future for myself and my family. I just wanted to live like a normal child, doing normal things and not having to worry about whether I’ll have food for the next meal, or enough clothing, or if I’ll be allowed to attend class without the required fees. 

Looking back at my mother who was raising five kids playing the role of both a mother and a father, I knew that she was doing the best that she could to raise and provide for us and I wanted to be able to help her in the future. I not only wanted to help her, but I didn’t want any family to end up like mine and kept on wondering what would happen if my mom went to school. She’d probably have a job and be able to support all of us comfortably. This is what motivated me all throughout my primary school, despite wanting to give up most of the time. I had managed to remain one of the top performing students in the class and my name never failed to be in the top 3. In grade 6, as one of the top 3 students, I was selected by the school for an interview for the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa where, if I was successful, I would get a full scholarship. I passed the interview and joined Aga Khan Academy Mombasa in January 2012 pursuing world class education in an environment that allowed me to focus on education while also taking part in extracurricular activities.

After high school, I will be joining Wellesley College in USA where I plan to venture into environmental science. Getting higher education abroad is particularly important for me. Since I am passionate about the environment and development, studying abroad will allow me to look at both issues from an international scale teaching to apply different solutions to local problems that Kenya currently faces. I will also be getting to know the bigger picture about environmental instability and development not only for Kenya but for the world at large; this is something that would be very hard to get at a local university. Getting to learn with people from all over the world is also another thing to add as I don’t only get to interact with them but I will get to know the kind of world they live in and what issues they face and how they approach them. This is beneficial for my growth and development in terms of applying different approaches to a problem, based on different perspectives from people all over the world.

After my studies I plan to come back to Kenya where I intend to apply all that I have learnt to solve local problems within my community and my country at large. One way I would like to do this is provide more educational opportunities for girls to attend school, making it a right rather than a choice so that less people end up like my mother did. I also want to venture into sustainable agriculture in a way that they would maximize their output while still not harming the environment. I want to make agriculture a reliable source of income for people in my community.

In my free time I like to read a lot. I read books and also read online. Reading helps me learn more about the world and also walk in other people’s paths of life. Through reading novels, I live another life. Through reading online, I tend to learn more about myself, exploring different things about myself while also learning about different issues affecting the world today. I research a lot about current issues mainly related to the environment and development just to keep myself up to date as well. As a person I would say that I’m an inquirer as I always want to know more and just look at another perspective on an issue. This helps me keep a balanced and understanding point of view especially when I interact with people.

I am also quite independent. Growing up and having no one to really rely on, I started sorting out my issues on my own without bothering my mum - this has really helped me grow to become my own person. My absolute passion lies with the environment and it’s beauty. This is something that I have been interested in from childhood because I’ve always felt a connection with nature and because of the different forms of environmental degradation I’ve seen which still haunt me up to date. When I see the environment degrading, even when I have no connection whatsoever with the issue, I usually feel responsible for the issue and grow this urge within me to stop the issues from carrying on. I have taught about the importance of the environment to various people in my community including students from my former school where I held my personal project - this has improved environmental conditions in my community. 

By Josephine Awino

Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad alumna (Class of 2018), Sarah Keshvani is currently in her first year at the University of Victoria, Canada. She plans to major in either biological sciences, with a concentration in neuroscience or kinesiology, or biochemistry. 

Sarah’s love for the sciences flourished during the Diploma Programme (DP) at the Academy in Hyderabad. Through her extended essay, she found the opportunity to learn more about how biology can provide solutions to modern challenges faced in local communities. She decided to tackle the issue of water shortages and soil nutrient deficiencies hindering large scale rice cultivation in the state of Telangana, leading to reduced crop yields. Due to zinc deficiencies in the soil, farmers resort to using huge amounts of fertilisers, which further degrade soil quality.

Sarah’s research centred on hydroponics as a possible solution to this problem. Plants are grown in water-based, nutrient solutions instead of soil.

“This technique has recently garnered a lot of attention because experiments have shown that growth is more than doubled when compared to traditional methods of agriculture,” Sarah explained. “Nutrient uptake is more efficient, and farmers can control the type of nutrients the plant is exposed to, in order to enhance different features of the yield. The use of water in hydroponics is still much more efficient than how it is used in open paddy fields that need to be covered in water during certain times of the crop cycle.”

“I designed my semi-closed hydroponics system based on the deep water culture technique,” Sarah elaborated. “Instead of buying the nutrient solution, I made my own. I wanted to specifically observe and analyse the effect of zinc uptake on the plant’s overall health. So I used four different zinc concentrations, and for the fifth set of plants, zinc was not added at all. Data was recorded over the course of three weeks. The effect of zinc was analysed through five variables: shoot length, root:shoot ratio, chlorophyll content, biomass and relative water content percentage. The goal was to find out an optimal concentration of zinc from those four different concentrations.”

Sarah’s conclusions were positive. Rapid growth was observed and the flexibility to control the nutrient uptake played a huge role in optimal plant health. She realised that a closed system would have provided more accurate results, as the higher evaporation rates disturbed the pH levels. Overall though, she deduced this technique could definitely tackle the challenges faced by paddy farmers.  

Sarah’s work with hydroponics was instrumental in securing her a role as a molecular biology research assistant at university. Her duties include assisting professors and doctorate students in their research; basic lab maintenance and keeping stocks; preparing bacterial and plant growth media; plant samples; and solutions for analysis. She also gets to work with graduate and PhD students on experiments involving nucleic acid isolation, amplification and cloning.

“The IB curriculum followed at the Academy has played a pivotal role in building many essential skills for university life,” Sarah reflected when asked how she has settled into this new phase. “The emphasis on academic integrity and independence have served me really well here. I was taught to think critically rather than blindly follow textbooks. Its skill-based learning approach, and connecting classroom learning to the real world, also prepared me well for higher education.”