Faith-Based Organizations Receive Largest Global Health Aid Allocation in Over 20 Years
The Trump administration has announced nearly $2 billion in funding for faith-based groups, with $1.4 billion going towards health services, including $850 million for World Vision to support 2,500 hospitals and clinics across 17 countries.
The recent announcement by the Trump administration to allocate nearly $2 billion to faith-based organizations for global health aid has significant implications for the sector. According to Alaa Murabit, a medical doctor and U.N. high-level commissioner, this move signals a shift in the way governments and international institutions engage with faith-based organizations.
The Faith Economy
Murabit argues that the faith economy, which includes the capital generated, governed, and invested through religious obligations, institutions, and financial systems, is not collapsing, unlike the traditional aid architecture. She believes that governments and international institutions have worked with faith-based organizations for decades, but have not built the financial infrastructure to receive, aggregate, and deploy the capital that faith itself produces.
In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based providers deliver a significant share of healthcare, with some countries relying on them for an estimated 30-40% of healthcare services. However, the capital generated through religious obligations, such as zakat, remains invisible to the institutions designing global financing. Zakat, a recurring annual obligation of 2.5% of qualifying wealth, is estimated to generate between $200 billion and $1 trillion annually.
Islamic Finance and Faith-Based Capital
Islamic finance offers a unique opportunity for faith-based capital to be mobilized for global health aid. Instruments such as waqf, an irrevocable endowment under Islamic law, can endow health, education, and other public goods over generations. Sovereign and thematic sukuk can finance hospitals, housing, and climate infrastructure, while sharia-compliant insurance and risk instruments can shift the cost of disasters away from government balance sheets.
Building the Architecture for Faith-Based Capital
Murabit emphasizes that building the architecture to receive faith-based capital is crucial, rather than just funding faith-based organizations. This requires connecting capital that already has its own investors, institutions, rules, and sources of legitimacy to the financing needs of governments. The U.N. Refugee Agency's Refugee Zakat Fund, which has supported over 9.9 million people, is an example of a global institution standardizing religious capital and making it usable at scale.
However, Murabit also notes that faith capital carries its own politics, with donors imposing conditions, institutions making choices about who deserves help, and scholars disagreeing about what qualifies. Built badly, it can reproduce exclusions and practices that global health and development institutions are trying to change. Nevertheless, ignoring faith capital does not make it disappear, and it can continue to move through communities whether global health and development institutions engage with it or not.
