Muslim Majorities Development: Families, Health and Social Services

Summary

Muslim-majority states are building parallel tracks for family welfare: mosque-based cooperatives and zakat agencies in Indonesia and Malaysia, and state cash-transfer and health-coverage schemes in Egypt and Pakistan.

What it argues

1. Mosque cooperative network

   Baznas (Indonesia) and Angkasa (Malaysia) signed an MOU to build mosque-based cooperatives tied to the national zakat system. Baznas's Mahdum says mosques have untapped potential as hubs of community economic activity. Angkasa's Abdul Fattah Abdullah wants a global mosque network he calls the world's largest cooperative consortium. Zakat bodies and cooperative movements are formalising mosques as engines of community economic empowerment.

2. Egypt's cash transfers

   Takaful pays conditional cash to poor families with children; Karama pays unconditional cash to the elderly and disabled. By 2024 the two programs reached 21 million people in 5.2 million households, per the Arab Reform Initiative. The World Bank put $900 million into the program for its first two phases, covering 3.7 million households by mid-2023. Egypt's flagship welfare program has scaled sharply since 2015 but its poverty impact is assessed unevenly.

3. Pakistan's cash transfers

   BISP pays cash directly to women heads of household, which the World Bank says boosted their national ID registration and financial inclusion. By 2013, 75% of disbursed cash reached the poorest fifth of households, up from 46% in 2011. A linked program, Waseela-e-Taleem, had enrolled 1.3 million children in school by 2019, nearly half of them girls. Direct payments to women have been used as the lever for both poverty relief and women's financial inclusion.

4. Egypt's welfare laws

   Egypt passed a Social Insurance Law (No. 148, 2019) and a Comprehensive Health Insurance Law (No. 2, 2018) to underpin the cash-transfer system. A Unified Cash Transfer Law folded older social-security beneficiaries into Takaful and Karama, covering roughly 1.2 million people. Egypt has moved to put its welfare programs on a unified legal footing rather than leaving them as ad hoc schemes.

5. Pakistan's health coverage

   The Sehat Sahulat Program, begun in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2015, issues Sehat Insaf Cards covering up to Rs 1 million per family per year in hospital treatment. A WHO-backed pilot in Islamabad and Charsadda (2021-2023) upgraded fifteen health facilities and trained staff in maternal-child health and disease screening. Federal Health Minister Dr Nadeem Jan calls the pilot a role model for countrywide rollout of the Universal Health Coverage Benefit Package. Pakistan is trying to turn provincial health-insurance pilots into a national universal-coverage system for families.

6. Mosque as community hub

   Angkasa's Abdul Fattah Abdullah says mosques should again serve as centers of worship, education, economic activity and community problem-solving, as in the time of the Prophet. Baznas's Mahdum says mosque cooperatives should not be held back by what he calls excessive conservatism. Both officials frame the cooperative push as reviving a historic, broader social role for the mosque.