When Zakat Becomes Mere Fund Redistribution
Asset redistribution is not a matter of amil intent, but of an ecosystem architecture that has grown obsolete. The 2025 National Zakat Management Report presents two notes that must be read side by side. Over the year, zakat managers across Indonesia disbursed Rp44.288 trillion to 43.74 million mustahik. By programme pillar, humanitarian work absorbed Rp4.649 trillion, while the economic sector received only Rp730.66 billion (1.65%) for 1,361,899 people, roughly 3% of recipients.
The economic sector is indeed the fastest-growing, at nearly 47%. But if it is the pillar closest to asset redistribution, the composition speaks for itself: after 15 years under Law No. 23 of 2011, Indonesian amil still find it easier to hand out funds than to transfer ownership.
Yet zakat is not a painkiller. The majority of scholars require tamlik (transfer of ownership), and al-Qaradawi insisted its measure is kifayah — sufficiency that frees the recipient from dependence. It is an instrument for restructuring capital ownership.
Why is that leap so difficult? Blaming incompetent amil is the easiest answer and, at the same time, a costly methodological error. Any organisation adapts its behaviour to the incentives around it. Let us dissect the rules of the game.
When a Shield Becomes a Shackle
KMA No. 606 of 2020 locks the amil’s share at 12.5% of zakat collection and 20% of infak, sadaqah and other religious social funds, whilst Law No. 41 of 2004 Article 12 caps nazir compensation at 10% of net returns, not asset principal, and Government Regulation No. 29 of 1980 allows 10% for general fundraising. All were born of the intention to protect mustahik and mauquf alaih.
The problem is that this shield now works like a shackle. Because the quota is locked to a percentage of collections, an institution’s survival depends on the funds that arrive that same year. Staple food distribution is not laziness: transaction costs are low, execution is fast, and risk is nearly zero.
If collections are Rp10 billion a year, the zakat organisation’s machine must run on Rp1.25 billion; recruiting specialised amil as analysts for productive programme feasibility could reduce capacity to collect next year.
Yes, consolidating the land of ten smallholder farmers into communal ownership demands feasibility studies, risk mapping, legal compliance, and years of accompaniment. Under audit, disbursing Rp1 billion for ten mustahik could threaten accountability. Even an institution thinking long-term punishes itself.
During public scrutiny of PMA No. 16 of 2025, Ahmad Syauqi, Sub-directorate Head for Zakat Institution Supervision at the Ministry of Religious Affairs, reminded that the amil share ceiling is a maximum, not a fixed figure, whilst floating the idea of performance-based ujrah. What remains missing is a technical design that separates the cost of administering charity from the cost of engineering structural change.
Assets Liberate, But Never Work Alone
The superiority of asset redistribution over cash aid has been tested experimentally. Balboni et al. in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2022) tracked 6,000 extremely poor rural households in Bangladesh for 11 years after random asset transfers and found an initial ownership threshold.
Those pushed past it kept accumulating assets and exited poverty; those who did not slipped back. This is the strongest defence of tamlik-based zakat — and its starkest warning: assets too small to cross the threshold simply disappear.
Research across six countries by Banerjee and Duflo in Science (2015), which helped its authors win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is consistent. The graduation programmes they tested were never single asset transfers, but packages: productive assets, consumption support, training, and accompaniment.
What made them work were precisely the components our ecosystem treats as administrative costs. We demand world-class impact whilst forbidding institutions from financing the parts that make it work.
Domestic evidence points the same way. Tika Widiastuti et al. in Heliyon (2022) tested zakat-waqf integration across six institutions: integrated programmes were 12% more effective than single instruments. Sari et al. (2019) showed time to exit poverty shortening from about 6.5 years without zakat to 3 years. The model has been tested; what does not yet exist is fiscal room for it.
No One Left Behind, But No One There
There are two gaps. Upstream, there is no recognised budget for planning, even though feasibility studies and risk mapping determine whether a programme lives or dies. Handing over assets without them is not boldness, but risk transfer to those least able to bear it.
Downstream, evaluation stops as a single event at a programme’s end. Annual graduation figures are merely a snapshot of the current cohort; they do not tell us whether those declared graduated in previous periods are still standing today. All we know is how many once rose, not how many remain prosperous.
The measurement infrastructure has been built. IZN 3.0 captures management quality up to national aggregation, with the 2025 score in the stable category, whilst the IDZ maps regional conditions to set aid priorities.
The instruments exist and zakat managers are willing to be measured. What is missing is acknowledgement that running them routinely on traceable targets costs money, and that cost has no home in the quota structure of licensed zakat institutions; even BAZNAS is constrained.
Architects’ Ambitions, Labourers’ Budgets
Amil are expected to read financial statements, map supply chains, understand property law, and design economic interventions. With rigid quotas, their compensation and career paths struggle to compete with corporations or national consultancies. Demanding first-class execution from such a narrow space is an unbalanced expectation.
Updating the Rules of the Game
Recalibrating amil compliance is indeed essential. First, operational quotas must be differentiated by programme category. For charity and emergency response, current limits remain relevant. For asset redistribution, regulators can open impact-investing schemes: planning costs, accompaniment, and longitudinal trace studies counted as programme investment, not amil costs.
Second, ecosystem infrastructure funds. Institutional donors, corporations, and consortia need to design enabling funds that are not disbursed to mustahik but instead finance the development of empowerment business models, amil talent capacity, and multi-year impact research — including an umbrella framework for cross-instrument programmes, since zakat and waqf sit under separate regulatory regimes.
Third, a shift from charity accounting to impact accounting. What deserves accountability is the durability of assets in mustahik hands years later, graduation verified through household monitoring, and communal capital ownership. Not competing over headcounts or rupiah, but how productive those assets are, and their sustainability.
From Beneficiaries to Owners
Amartya Sen reads poverty as capability deprivation, not income shortfall. Muhammad Yunus warned that continuous charity can strip the poor of their own initiative. Both converge with the Qur’anic message that wealth must not merely circulate among the rich.
This transformation will not be achieved so long as we demand first-class results from an architecture designed on past assumptions. Regulators, amil, donors, and academics must sit together. Zakat holds a promise far greater than a sack of rice: turning those who have always received into people who own.