Your questions answered

Yes, we welcome your support. If you have a heart for Somalia and its people, we sincerely hope that Zamzam Foundation UK can be an effective conduit for your zakat to support lifesaving and life-changing programmes in Somalia all the year round, whenever you choose to pay.

In 2023 ZZF’s emergencies, livelihoods, health, education and water projects benefited 1,282,525 people. With the support of your zakat donations, we hope to help many more Somalis through these programmes in the years to come.

Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam alongside faith (shahada), salah (prayer), sawm (fasting) and hajj (pilgrimage). Muslims are expected to pay zakat to redistribute wealth to those less fortunate if they have reached the age of puberty, are of sound mind, and have been above the qualifying wealth threshold for at least one full lunar year.

The minimum amount of wealth required, known as nisab, can be calculated in your local currency based on the equivalent cost of a certain weight of gold or silver. Those eligible to pay zakat should give 2.5% of their surplus wealth. Check out our zakat calculator to work out how much you should pay.

There are eight categories of people who are eligible to receive zakat:

1. The poor
2. The needy
3. Administrators of zakat
4. Those who have a reconciliation of the heart (people who have embraced Islam)
5. People who have been enslaved
6. Those in debt
7. In the cause of God
8. Travellers (including refugees)

The four key categories for Zamzam in this list are numbers 1,2, 7 and 8. Through your zakat donations to Zamzam UK we can support the poor, the needy and displaced people individually across Somalia (categories 1, 2 and 8) and also support transformative community projects that are zakat-eligible (under category 7).

Your zakat donations help us fund emergency interventions providing food, shelter and clean water to individuals; the building of clinics, schools and water infrastructure projects such as wells and boreholes ‘in the cause of God’; and support for individual livelihoods to lift families out of poverty.

Our donation options on this website enable you to choose between giving Sadaqah (voluntary charity) or giving zakat. When you choose the zakat option your donation goes into a separate zakat fund that is used mostly to assist zakat-eligible individuals (the poor, the needy and displaced people) but also to support zakat-eligible community projects. Your zakat will be spent in one or more of five programme areas – emergency response, livelihoods, water, education, or health – when you pay your zakat to us via this website.

Zamzam Foundation UK and ZZF in Somalia will ensure between us that your zakat is only used to fund the zakatable elements of projects we implement using these funds. We are ourselves eligible to receive some of your zakat as administrators of zakat (category 3 of the eight categories of eligible zakat recipients). Our policy is to reserve 12.5% of zakat donations for administration.

Zamzam Foundation and Zamzam UK take our shared responsibility as collectors and distributors of zakat very seriously. We are accountable to do so not only to our beneficiaries and our donors but also to Allah (SWT).

We have adopted the zakat policy developed by Islamic Relief and developed our own adapted version, and we are grateful to Islamic Relief for authorising us to do so. This is a policy developed over several years by Islamic Relief’s independent zakat Advisory Board to ensure that it is in keeping with Islamic teachings and guidance. In developing the policy Islamic Relief consulted with all its offices around the world to secure their buy-in, including Islamic Relief Somalia.

By following this policy we can ensure that your zakat is only spent on projects that meet appropriate and specific zakat criteria. Islamic Relief is in the process of providing specialist training to relevant Zamzam Foundation staff to ensure the policy is correctly implemented. Responsibility for correct implementation will rest solely with Zamzam Foundation and Zamzam UK staff.