The problems our planet is faced with are complex and all-spanning. Global environmental degradation and climate change are coupled with increasingly alarming social fracture and economic disparities. Governments alone have failed to provide solutions to those wicked and highly interconnected problems.
In the past fifteen years, a new generation of entrepreneurs have attempted to address the social and environmental complexities at local and regional levels through the so-called social innovation. However, these social entrepreneurs face major hurdles including financing and scaling their products and services. On the other hand, the Waqf institution, considered in the past centuries in Islamic civilization as a major enabler of social and economic welfare, has remained relatively disconnected from modern capital markets and their various forms to achieve growth.
In a paper published in the proceedings of the Waqf and Sustainable development symposium held at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University last summer, Dr. Fadwa Chaker and Dr. Wail Aaminou demonstrate how the Waqf institution can be placed at the heart of sustainable economic development by bridging the demand and supply sides of social innovation through structured and efficient mechanisms. The authors firstly describe the theoretical grounding behind social innovation and its role in driving large-scale social impact and sustainable growth. Then, they discuss the Waqf institution as an unconventional instrument for wealth redistribution and eventual economic prosperity. Drawing on the preceding literature discussion, they present a conceptual framework that describes the mechanism through which the Waqf institution can boost inclusive growth by bringing together multiple for-profit and non-profit stakeholders. The authors illustrate the presented framework with the case of good health and well-being as one of the important UN sustainable development goals. In doing so, they show how Waqf helps social innovators address the structural challenges of financing and scalability and how this innovative instrument can thus be considered as a paramount lever for achieving sustainable development.
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