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The purpose of this study is to examine the efficiency and productivity performance of zakat funds managed by Directorates of Religious Affairs and Endowments (DRAE) in Algeria.

In this study, the authors employ data envelopment analysis and measure Malmquist Productivity Index for DRAE’s input and output data spanning from 2003 to 2013.

The authors find that total factor productivity has increased sharply for all zakat funds, mainly due to a technical rather than efficiency change. Further decomposition of the efficiency change into its pure technical and scale efficiency components suggests that the pure efficiency is a more important source of efficiency change than the scale efficiency component, meaning that zakat funds rely on technical aspects to gain efficiency.

The findings of this study are expected to contribute considerably to the existing knowledge on the operating performance of zakat funds in Algeria.

This paper aims to fill the noticeably fragmented zakat literature repertoire by empirically exploring stakeholders’ views toward zakat management performance issues based on a selected zakat institution (ZI) operating on a corporatized platform with corporate administrative style.

A quantitative approach using a questionnaire survey distributed to Muslims in the State which ZI is operating was adopted. A total of 448 usable responses are used in the analysis covering descriptive and mean difference.

The results indicate that managerial reform configuration in terms of corporatization has been viewed positively by stakeholders, translated into a comforting agreement score toward ZI’s improved management performance (collection, disbursement and reporting). Such perceptions are, however, observably sensitive to demographic factors of gender and employment type. The survey also document evidence that the corporatization exercise itself had improved respondents’ confidence toward ZI being the zakat administrator in the State.

The research contributes to the public policy debate with respect to corporatized ZI’s management performance from the stakeholders’ perspective. The results are arguably informative at various levels, forming a basis for reality check and policy inputs for various stakeholders, including (but not limited to) the ZI itself, zakat payers and asnafs, particularly in designing relevant and necessary administrative strategies and relevant policy formulation in addressing the performance and accountability issues in ZIs.

Zakat (Islamic almsgiving) plays a considerable role in dealing with the socioeconomic issues in times of COVID-19 pandemic, and such roles have been widely discussed in virtual events. This paper aims to discover knowledge of the current global zakat administration from virtual events of zakat (e.g. webinars) on YouTube and Zoom via text mining approach.

The authors purposefully sampled 12 experts from four different virtual zakat events on YouTube and Zoom. The automated text transcription software is used to pull the information from the sampled videos into text documents. A qualitative analysis is operated using text mining approach via machine learning tool (i.e. Orange Data Mining). Four research questions are developed under the Word Cloud visualisation, hierarchal clustering, topic modelling and graph and network theory.

The machine learning identifies the most important words, the relationship between the experts and their top words and discovers hidden themes from the sample. This finding is practically substantial for zakat stakeholders to understand the current issues of global zakat administration and to learn the applicable lessons from the current issues of zakat management worldwide.

This study does not establish a positivist generalisation from the findings because of the nature and objective of the study.

A policy implication is drawn pertaining to the legislation of zakat as an Islamic financial policy instrument for combating poverty in Muslim society.

This work supports the notion of “socioeconomic zakat”, implying that zakat as a religious obligation is important in shaping the social and economic processes of a Muslim community.

This work marks the novelty in making sense of the unstructured data from virtual events on YouTube and Zoom in the Islamic social finance research.

This study aims to analyze the concept of Zakat as an instrument to increase the economy and poverty eradication in Indonesia.

This study used a qualitative method based on library research sourced from books, financial reports and another previous research.

The results show that the empowerment programs conducted by Zakat institutions in Indonesia are based on the scale of priorities and the potential of Mustahik. Zakat management considers the level of productivity and long-term impacts that improve Mustahik Economy. Thus, the empowerment programs lead to the reduction of Mustahik living below poverty line.

This study contributes in two ways: first, it analyzes a model to identify the Mustahik’s potential for the Zakat institution in Indonesia. Second, it encourages the awareness of Muzakki and Mustahik regarding the role of Zakat in the Indonesian economy. This is expected to prompt their level of participation in optimizing the potential of Zakat in Indonesia.

Given the scarce literature that provide qualitative and critical reviews of the implementation Zakat empowerment programs to alleviate poverty conducted by the Zakat institutions in Indonesia, this research can act as a bridge for future research in performing empirical studies regarding the impact of a Zakat empowerment program on society.