GENEVA: The UN on Friday said that its refugee operations were seeing increasing funding through a dedicated Islamic philanthropy platform to collect the donations required of Muslims under the religion.
A day after the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the UN refugee agency said it was increasingly able to channel obligatory donations under Islam to help fund its relief activities.
Since it was first piloted in 2017, the UNHCR’s Refugee Zakat Fund has raised around $200 million from Zakat — one of the five basic pillars of Islam, which requires Muslims to give about 2.5 percent of their savings and wealth annually as obligatory almsgiving — and from voluntary donations known as Sadaqah.
“During the last five years, the fund managed to assist six million people, mainly in Muslim majority countries, with the Sadaqah and the Zakat,” Khaled Khalifa, UNHCR’s representative to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, told reporters in Geneva.
The key recipient operations have been for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and internally displaced people in Yemen.
Cash assistance and aid have been handed out to deserving people across 26 countries.
Last year, the fund received around $21.3 million in Zakat contributions and around $16.7 million in Sadaqah donations, the UNHCR said.
Khalifa said the UNHCR platform had become the main beneficiary of such funds within the UN system and perhaps in the international humanitarian sector.
While the aid went mainly to Muslim countries, Khalifa said, “we do not help Muslims alone, and we do not differentiate among the beneficiaries by religion.”
UN hope for bigger contributions in future
He acknowledged that Islamic philanthropy represented “only a drop in the ocean” compared to the UN refugee agency’s overall multibillion-dollar budget.
“I hope it will be much bigger in the future,” he said.
So far, Sheikh Thani Bin Abdullah Bin Thani Al-Thani of Qatar, who serves as a UNHCR advocate, has been the biggest contributor to the fund, providing more than $110 million to date, or over half of the total contributions.
“I think this demonstrates how powerful this tool could be if we provide a platform for individual donors who can contribute to refugee issues worldwide,” Khalifa said.
He added that the fund is trying to “reduce our dependence on large donors… and to rely more on small, individual donors who can contribute small amounts but in an economy-of-scale perspective.”
The agency is hoping to see more funds coming in during Ramadan.
“Last year, we raised more than $20 million in Ramadan alone,” Khalifa said. “We are hoping to exceed that this year.”
