CHARITY: GOD’S SYSTEM Part 1: Zakat

God has given us voluntary charity and obligatory charity (Zakat) as opportunities to grow our souls. Being charitable is a trait of submitters, and those who believe in God naturally want to give charity.

[3:17] They are steadfast, truthful, submitting, charitable, and meditators at dawn.

[3:92] You cannot attain righteousness until you give to charity from the possessions you love. Whatever you give to charity, GOD is fully aware thereof.

In the 2022 June issue of Nature, a respected academic journal, they had an article titled: “These experiments could lift millions out of dire poverty” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01679-y. The article discussed some of the benefits of charity. A few extracts follow.

In 2012, the government of Niger began giving some of its poorest citizens free money. Over the next few years, around 100,000 participating households received 24 monthly payments of roughly US$16 — which more than doubled their typical spending power.

The programme was based on decades of evidence from carefully controlled trials, suggesting that simple cash infusions can transform lives. And Niger is not alone: cash transfers have become a popular tool as governments try to alleviate poverty.

Several years in, the effort in Niger would also serve as a crucial testing ground for a new generation of expanded assistance programmes that offer people various types of personal, social and economic support in addition to hard cash. In a report issued last year, the World Bank identified more than 200 such programmes in 75 countries, which collectively reach nearly 92 million people.

But that’s just a fraction of the number of people living in extreme poverty. More than 650 million people across the globe get by on less than US$1.90 per day, with severe impacts on public health and social and political stability  …

Cash benefits

One of the primary lessons from rigorous research into poverty reduction should not, perhaps, come as a surprise: giving people money makes them less poor.

“It’s almost arithmetic,” says David Evans, an economist with the Center for Global Development in Washington DC.

And yet, it took years of research to allay fears that poor people, given free money, would decline legitimate work and squander their new-found resources on temptations such as alcohol and tobacco. Not only did the ‘labour/leisure trade-off’ fail to materialize, but once economists started running trials, the opposite effect prevailed time and again: free money translated into free time, and poor people tended to use that time productively.

In one trial conducted in 2011–13, economists tested a simple cash-transfer programme in Kenya. Two groups of roughly 250 participants received the equivalent of around $400, either as a lump sum or broken up into 9 equal payments; among those, 137 households received an extra $1,100 over the course of 7 months. The monthly instalments

Cont'd on page 2