What is Afterfund?
Afterfund is a new “digital waqf” platform. What’s a waqf? It’s where your donation is multiplied through halal investing and profits are automatically distributed each year to causes you care about.
This way we make your donation perpetual, and with the same amount you help more people — even after you die.
And through our digital platform, you can track the impact you are making.
Afterfund is built for a generation that values technology, transparency, and the impact we make with our donations.
How does Afterfund work?
- Pick a cause that you care about and donate.
- Your donation lands directly into a charity’s secure account for the cause you picked. The charity is the only one with access to that account. You’re now a waqif, and you get your own waqf certificate.
- The charity grows your donation in a halal way. This means that the money you donated is invested in halal-certified funds made of real estate and companies all around the world.
- Every year the profits made from the growth of funds are distributed to the cause you picked, while the principal (the original amount donated) stays invested to continue multiplying your donation.
- At the end of every year, Afterfund will send you an impact report showing how your donation was distributed and the difference it made.
How does the waqf grow?
The charity spreads investments across halal-certified funds that invest globally and across industries to minimize the risk and ensures that all the “eggs” are never in one basket.
These funds invest in public companies, real estate, and other market-worthy instruments.
Afterfund does not provide investment advice or services to donors. Rather, our partner charities grow their waqf funds with standards for investing based on the risk tolerance and cause they are investing for.
We work with Islamic charities and all the investments they make are halal-certified with AAOIFI standards.
Math time: How do the profits get distributed?
Let’s say you donate $1000 to continuously provide meals.
On average, in the past 30 years, the market grew 10% per year.
So after 1 year, that $1000 grows to $1100.
Now, the charity takes part of the profits to buy the meals, and the other part stays together with the initial donation to continue multiplying and producing more meals.
For example, we buy meals for $50 and reinvest $50.
So, we start year 2 with $1050, and after another year, that grows to $1155.
Now, we can distribute even more meals!
Every year, more and more.
This is called compounding, and it’s one of the most powerful characteristics of investing.
If we repeat this process over and over again,
during an average lifetime (77 years), you provide ~33x more meals than with your traditional donation.
Let’s say you donated to a water well. It’s considered a lasting good, but it’s not very usual to calculate how many liters of water it will provide. We wanted to cover this aspect as well to make sure you understand the impact — the difference you can make with Afterfund.
The market grows on average 10% per year, but what happens if it does not grow or goes down?
Just like a planted palm tree might not give yields during a dry year, the same can happen with Afterfund donations during global crises as well.
However, this usually happens in short periods.
Long term, the market has historically always grown as the world economy develops and grows.
Let’s take a look at the market in the past 20 years:
As you can see, during the COVID-19 crisis, the market went down, but it quickly recovered and grew even more.
When you are donating to a waqf, you don’t want to look short term - you want something that actively creates good deeds for you LONG TERM, during your lifetime, and even beyond.
Why is this better than, say, gifting real estate as a waqf?
“Afterthoughts”
We worked really hard to do everything we can to enable our generation to make a true, lasting impact on this world. And in the end,
We covered lots of different cases to make sure your Afterfund donation makes more impact than a traditional one, and we set a foundation to rebuild the waqf system for our generation — one that is digital, transparent and focused on impact.
If you have any questions about Afterfund, please message me at omar@afterfund.co
Author: Omar Yunus
Omar Yunus has spent entire career in Islamic finance. He was part of a team that successfully raised and managed over EUR 100 million, worked for a halal VC, and developed halal market indices for a European stock exchange.
Inspired by the sunnah of the Prophet, where people would plant palm trees, sell the dates, and donate money to different causes, he left his job to digitize this sunnah and build Afterfund
