Monthly Zakat Stipend
One payment helps a family through a bad month. A payment they can count on for the next several months changes what they can do with the month after that. This fund gives a verified Zakat-eligible household a fixed sum on a fixed date, for an agreed term, and then steps back.
Why a stipend rather than a cheque
A household with no cushion cannot take the good option. It sells the goat before the goat is worth selling. It takes the loan at the terrible rate. It pulls a child out of school for a term that turns into a year. Every one of those choices is rational in the moment and expensive for a decade.
A stipend does something a single gift cannot: it makes the next few months predictable. Predictability is what lets a family stop making emergency decisions and start making ordinary ones.
Almost nothing. There are no conditions attached to the money, no receipts to submit, and no requirement to spend it a particular way. Zakat is theirs by right, not a grant we supervise.
What we do ask is that they talk to us before the term ends, so the exit is planned rather than abrupt.
What the research says
Cash transfers to the very poor are among the most heavily studied interventions in development economics, which means we do not have to guess.
Six countries · 11,000 households
The graduation approach pairs a productive asset with temporary monthly consumption support, coaching, and a savings account. Tested by randomised trial across Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan and Peru, consumption was still higher a full year after the programme ended, and the benefits exceeded the costs at five of the six sites.
Banerjee et al., Science, 2015 ↗Ghana site
In the Ghana arm, households received a weekly payment for 14 of the programme's 24 months. A year after it all ended, monthly consumption was 11% higher than the comparison group and income from non-farm work was 91% higher. The stipend is what stops a family from eating the asset before it can earn.
J-PAL, Graduating the Ultra-Poor in Ghana ↗Bangladesh · 21,000 households · 7 years
BRAC's programme was followed for seven years across 1,309 villages. Households kept climbing after the support ended, with gains at seven years as large as or larger than at two and four. This is not a treadmill that families fall off when the payments stop.
Bandiera et al., via the International Growth Centre ↗Where the evidence cuts the other way
We should be straight about this, because it shaped how we run the fund. When researchers compared a lump sum against the same total paid out monthly, in Kenya, the lump sum did better on buying durable assets. The monthly version did better on food security. Households struggle to save small instalments into something big, so a stream is not simply a better version of a cheque.
So we do not claim a stipend beats capital. We run both, and we try to match the instrument to the household. A family that needs to stop losing ground gets a stipend. A family with a trade and a plan gets capital they keep. The graduation trials suggest the strongest results come from a household getting both, which is why the two funds sit side by side.
Haushofer & Shapiro, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016 ↗How we run it
The same screening as the rest of our Zakat: net wealth below the nisab, assessed against the eight Quranic categories, with the household visited rather than assessed on paper.
A fixed sum arrives on the same date each month for an agreed number of months. Both the amount and the end date are set at the start, and the family knows them.
It is their money. Most of it goes on food, rent, school costs and medicine, which is exactly the point: those are the bills that force people to sell what they own.
Near the end of the term we sit down with the household. Some are ready to finish. Some need a further term. Some are better served by capital, at which point we talk about the entrepreneur fund.
Priority goes to households with a disabled member, to widows, and to elderly heads of household. Historically the stipend has been $40 to $80 a month, though the amount tracks local costs rather than a fixed figure, and 100% of your Zakat reaches the family.
A monthly gift funds a monthly stipend, which is the closest thing we have to handing someone back the ability to plan.