Tying in Sunnah, Quran, and Research Evidence to Craft the World's First Waqf Fund that Perpetually Helps People in Extreme Poverty

Afterfund
3 min readDec 21, 2023

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The Sunnah

Afterfund’s concept is simple and powerful. Instead of spending your donation immediately, it gets invested in halal funds. The initial donation always stays invested and its profits perpetually support the cause you picked (here’s a detailed look at how Afterfund works). This creates a 30x larger impact over a lifetime, compared to a traditional donation that is spent immediately (see how donations are spent with Afterfund’s impact report).

This exact concept, where your single donation continuously works for you, is based on the Sunnah of waqf, which is a story of palm trees and infinite giving. Today, Afterfund has digitized this Sunnah and made it accessible to our digital generation.

Afterfund is based on the sunnah in which, during the time of the Prophet, people would plant palm trees, sell the dates every year, and then donate money. This way, with a single palm tree, they would be doing continuous good.

The Quran

Now, with Afterfund, we have a tool that turns our money into a machine that constantly creates impact and good deeds for us. But what is the largest form of impact we can create?

So what if there was a fund that takes a single donation, and perpetually works on the most efficient way to prevent deaths on our behalf — how do we know what would be the most efficient way to do that?

The Research Evidence

Backed by researchers from Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, and other prestigious institutions, Effective Altruism is a movement that uses evidence to find the most pressing causes that help people in extreme poverty while preventing the most deaths per dollar.

For example, spending $10 in the US can get you a coffee. But spending the same amount could buy ~10 Vitamin A supplements that can literally save the sight of a child in Kenya and have a significant impact on their lives moving forward. (source). Or, it could buy malaria nets that prevent this deadly disease from which 14,500 children die every year (source).

The University of Oxford has started the Global Priorities Institute — Foundational academic research on how to do the most good (link)

The Fund

Piggybacking on this continuously updated research, and by partnering with the global nonprofit One for the World, we created the world’s first fund that takes your single donation and then perpetually works on helping people in extreme poverty while preventing the most deaths per dollar on your behalf.

So instead of buying, for example, vitamin supplements (or malaria nets) once and preventing the death of one child, your single donation continues to provide new ones, over and over again, saving the lives of many children.

Muslims donate billions of dollars every year, and if we mobilize just a small fraction towards saving lives most effectively through Afterfund, we will maximize our impact to systematically eradicate poverty and continuously prevent the deaths of thousands and millions of underprivileged children around the world.

This fund is now available at afterfund.co

Unlisted

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