Established with Purpose
Aliya KanjiFoundation
Some people grow up watching the world and wondering what they can do about it. I was lucky enough to grow up with an answer — and this Foundation is what I am doing with it.
Established with Purpose
Some people grow up watching the world and wondering what they can do about it. I was lucky enough to grow up with an answer — and this Foundation is what I am doing with it.
Our Foundation
Mission
The Aliya Kanji Foundation works to save and improve lives by focusing on what communities in the Global South need most urgently: clean water, food, and nutritional supplements. We believe you cannot talk about education, opportunity, or potential until a child is safe, fed, and healthy. We back programmes that are honest about what works, and we share what we learn — because this work is too important for any one foundation to keep to itself.
Vision
I have spent real time in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and across India. I have sat with families, played with children, and seen with my own eyes what life looks like when the basics are missing. Geography and circumstance should not determine who gets to survive childhood, let alone thrive. Once communities are no longer at risk of losing their children to preventable causes, the Foundation turns to its next horizon: education, and everything it makes possible.
How We Work
Every decision starts with one question: does the evidence show this saves or improves lives? We fund programmes with honest track records — and we stay close enough to know the difference between impact and intention.
Informed by naturopathic training and years of time in the field, we look at communities whole — not as a collection of deficits to be fixed, but as people with lives, dignity, and potential. Clean water and nutrition come first. Then everything else becomes possible.
The most effective philanthropy rarely happens in isolation. We work alongside organisations, institutions, and individuals whose expertise sharpens our own — because a well-placed partnership can do more than any single grant.
Money alone rarely solves anything. We invest in the people and organisations doing the work on the ground — sharing strategy, experience, and networks to help them grow sustainably, not just survive the current year.
A child who is sick or malnourished cannot learn. A mother who lacks clean water cannot keep her family safe. We champion preventive, integrative approaches to health in communities that conventional systems have historically left behind.
The Foundation is still young. We are building carefully, and we are honest — with ourselves and with others — about what we have done, what we have learned, and what we are still figuring out. That honesty is part of the work.
In the Field
These photographs are from Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. They are not curated moments — they are afternoons, conversations, card games on the ground. This is where the Foundation's thinking comes from, and why it will never be abstract.
Founder
Growing up, my family's life was shaped by a profound sense of gratitude and service — and by the example of His Highness the Aga Khan, whose Development Network has spent decades building schools, hospitals, and communities across the developing world. That model of sustained, serious giving is what I have always aspired to.
Aliya graduated Cum Laude from Princeton with a degree in Economics, and went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. She spent years in the corporate world — McKinsey & Company, Saks Fifth Avenue, DeBeers Diamond Jewellers in London — building the analytical and operational instincts that now inform how the Foundation approaches its work. In 2009 she founded AK Properties Incorporated, a residential real estate development business.
Alongside her professional life, Aliya spent years travelling through Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and India — not as a tourist, but as someone genuinely trying to understand how people live, what they need, and where outside help makes a real difference. Those experiences, accumulated slowly over time, are the reason the Foundation exists.
Aliya graduated from the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London — deepening a long-held conviction that health is where everything else begins. That same year, she established the Aliya Kanji Foundation. It is early days. But the direction is clear: clean water and nutrition first, then education, then the longer work of building lives that have real choices in them.
Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude
Graduated Cum Laude with a degree in Economics, with Minors in Latin American Studies and Spanish. Aliya serves on the Advisory Boards of Princeton International Relations & Regional Studies, the Center for Global India, and the Mpala Institute. In 2024, Kanji Hall opened at New College West — built to enable more students to benefit from a Princeton education.
Master of Business Administration
The discipline of a Harvard MBA — how to allocate resources, how to measure what matters, how to build something that lasts — shapes how the Foundation approaches every programme it supports. Member of the HBS Alumni Board and the Harvard Business School Fund.
Naturopathic Medicine
A training that confirmed what Aliya had long believed: that health is not a luxury, and that preventive, integrative care is the most humane and effective place to start. The Foundation's focus on clean water and nutrition flows directly from this conviction.
