Foundation Program Officer
1977 CLHS graduate Kathy Bartlett is currently a Senior Program Officer with the Aga Khan Foundation based in Switzerland where she has worked for twelve years. Kathy, who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, is responsible for overall program planning, management, monitoring and policy dialogue related to the Foundation’s Early Childhood Development Programs in South Asia, Eastern Africa, Tajikistan, Portugal, the United States, and Syria.
In addition, Kathy is Co-Director of the Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and Development, an international consortium to which she is seconded from AKF on a part-time basis.
Born on a family farm near Clear Lake, Kathy is the daughter of Marlene and Bob Bartlett. A high school basketball and volleyball player, she attended Central College where she continued playing volleyball. After receiving her BA in Elementary Education, Kathy taught in Blyth, California, including two years as the teacher of a bi-lingual kindergarten class, before entering the Peace Corps and serving in Honduras for two years. Following that service, she returned to the University of Iowa to complete first her Master’s and then her Doctorate Degree.
While she continued her education, Kathy also worked as a pre-school teacher at the Montessori Pre-school of Iowa City for the first year. Then, while working toward her Ph.D, Kathy traveled to rural Costa Rica, conducting research into working women’s use of and access to social support networks for child care. Competitively selected to work as a summer graduate intern with the Ford Foundation’s Urban Poverty Program, Kathy worked the summer of 1989 in New York reviewing and researching programs related to young children’s survival, care, development and education.
Also while at the University of Iowa, Kathy worked as Supervisor of Student Teachers in the Office of Student Field Experiences, mentoring, observing and evaluating undergraduate student teachers and graduate international students. In this position, she developed seminars on child abuse, classroom management, multicultural education, and other topics.
In 1991 and 1992, Kathy was Senior Trainer at the U.S. Peace Corps Center in Costa Rica, working with volunteers in the Corps’ Integrated Child and Community Development Program.
Kathy began working with the Aga Khan Foundation in November of 1992. The Foundation is a non-denominational, international development agency established in 1967 by His Highness the Aga Khan. Its mission is to develop and promote creative solutions to problems that impede social development, primarily in Asia and East Africa. Created as a private, non-profit foundation under Swiss law, it has branches and independent affiliates in 15 countries.
In her position as Senior Program Officer, Kathy is responsible for developing, managing, and monitoring the Young Children and Family Program and selected school improvement projects at the primary level. As CGECCD Co-Director, she works to secure funding for critical early childhood programs. She attends key conferences, such as the Education Forum for All and the UN Special Session on Children, to promote and ensure attention to early childhood care and development programs. She assists in the writing and editing of the organizations’ publications and organizes their annual meetings.
Kathy also serves on the adjunct faculty of the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, for Early Childhood Development Education through its Virtual University MA program. She has been invited to speak internationally on numerous occasions and has authored articles and papers related to her work in Early Childhood Development and Education.
Her contributions include co-organizing and chairing a roundtable for AKF and World Bank colleagues and presenting in Power Point format “The Shaping of Quality Education” for the International working Group on Education’s meeting in Florence, Italy.
Kathy’s fluency in Spanish has been an underlying contributor to her work, from the California pre-school through her experiences in Honduras and Costa Rica to the presentation in Spanish of her paper on “Working Women, Child Care and Social Support Networks in the Limon Region of Costa Rica” in Lima.