The institution that pioneered the application of temporary cash waqf (الوقف النقدي المؤقت) to benevolent lending — fusing 1,400 years of Islamic endowment tradition with modern financial innovation.
Awqaf New Zealand's pioneering contribution is the application of temporary cash waqf (الوقف النقدي المؤقت) specifically for benevolent lending (Qard Hasan) — distinct from other temporary cash waqf models, which focus on investment rather than interest-free lending.
This structural arrangement is designed to give transparent tracking, governance and asset-lifecycle discipline.
Two waqf-based mechanisms, each designed to apply underused charitable capital to productive assets whose revenues serve social development.
Applies temporary cash waqf to income-generating assets — farms, agri-projects and community enterprises — which remain tradable and are not themselves waqf, under full Shariah governance.
A pioneering zero-waste Qurbani model — a planned network of East Friesian sheep-dairy farms designed to turn every part of the sacrificial animal into lasting economic value.
Qurbani is a global industry — a conservatively estimated US$8 billion each year — yet much of each animal's value (wool, hide, dairy) is lost. Our planned response is not a single farm but a climate-adaptive framework, replicated region by region. Spreading production across climates and continents is also deliberate risk management — a diversified, resilient supply that keeps Qurbani livestock stable and steady, season after season. In every country, local partners provide the land, market and authority; Awqaf New Zealand contributes the model and the innovation, with capital raised through waqf — never from Awqaf New Zealand's own funds.
Replicate, not Duplicate.
All regions remain at the planning / feasibility-study stage.
International roll-out depends on the rulings of a specialised international jurisprudential forum on waqf.
Awarded in recognition of Awqaf New Zealand's pioneering temporary cash waqf model for benevolent lending.
The foundational temporary cash waqf structure was reviewed by the International Shari'ah Research Academy for Islamic Finance (ISRA), Kuala Lumpur, and approved in general by its Council of Scholars on 3 November 2016.
Dual-contract waqf structure designed in line with AAOIFI Standards 33 & 60 and OIC Islamic Fiqh Academy Resolutions 140 (2004) & 181 (2009).
Every year the world's Qurbani discards most of what it sacrifices — hide, wool, bone, milk. Awqaf New Zealand is building farms that waste none of it, and training the people who will run them. We are opening that work to independent academic scrutiny and publishing every finding freely as a waqf of knowledge — including the results that do not favour us. Five postgraduate research tracks, anchored in New Zealand, open to partners internationally.
Our first full feasibility study is published openly, so that its assumptions, figures and methods can be examined and challenged. It sets out the design, the capital schedule, the expected social and economic development outcomes, the UN Sustainable Development Goals we can measure against — and an entire section on the questions we cannot yet answer.
It also publishes a correction: an earlier capital schedule omitted items entirely, and a practitioner who reviewed it unprompted was right on every one of them.
Read the feasibility study →Available in English and Arabic (العربية). · Earlier versions (v1 · v2, superseded) · Feedback log
Awqaf New Zealand’s founding claim is that the annual Qurbani is the largest single source of wasted charitable resource. That claim has never been measured. There is no global Qurbani census, and nowhere any count of what becomes of the animal. This note proposes a way to measure it, adapting the published food-loss methodology of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that underlies SDG indicator 12.3.1(a) to the Qurbani supply chain, and proposing a utilisation rate reported stage by stage rather than as a single headline figure. It also proposes a register of what the field currently publishes about its own Qurbani programmes — recorded as claims, not as data — because the field counts what it gives away and does not count what it discards.
It contains no findings, and it states its own strongest objections in full — including the objection that Awqaf New Zealand has an interest in the answer. It is offered to universities and government research centres to carry out independently.
Read the methodology note →Available in English and Arabic (العربية). · PDF (EN) · PDF (AR) · Licence CC BY-NC 4.0
The feasibility study and the Qurbani Utilisation Index are released under an open licence for exactly that reason. Any university, research centre or operator is free to apply the method to a flock, an abattoir or a supply chain it already has — and Awqaf New Zealand does not need to be a party to the work, to be named in it, or to hold any claim over it. We have no farm, no flock and no capital; what we have is a published method, and a method is worth nothing until someone else uses it.
We ask one thing of anyone who does. Measure the utilisation rate and publish it — including the parts of the result that do not favour the method, or us. That number does not currently exist anywhere in the world, and a figure that only appears when it is flattering is not a measurement.
All five are proposed research topics. None is under way; there is no farm, no flock and no data.
Livestock telemetry, precision dairy systems and lunar-cycle operational modelling — and the digital waqf financing that would pay for them.
Whether farm data can be turned into animated explanation, so that transparency reaches non-technical and multilingual audiences without language as a barrier — and where digital tools stop.
Zero-waste conversion of Qurbani by-products, renewable microgrids and carbon-conscious farming — measured as a published utilisation rate: the share of each animal's value returned to social development. No one in this industry publishes that number.
Awqaf New Zealand's farms are training farms from their first day, run with an accredited provider. We are not inventing a training model — we are replicating a New Zealand one that has worked for a century under public-trustee oversight, for communities it has never reached.
A temporary cash waqf offered in small units to the public has no precedent to follow. How should such an instrument be designed to satisfy capital-market regulation, charity law and Shariah at the same time — including the distinction between a temporary cash waqf and qard hasan, and what should properly happen if an offering is under- or oversubscribed? An unresolved question, with a documented case to study.
Zero waste is a search problem. A single sacrificial animal yields a dozen by-products — hide, wool, bone, tallow, offal, milk — and each has several possible processing routes, markets, seasons and regulatory conditions, across more than sixty countries. The combinations run into the thousands, and no volunteer team can search them. Generative AI can propose and rank those routes, draft and stress-test the models, and carry a single finding into five languages and into animation for those who do not read them. What it cannot do is verify. Every route it proposes must still be tested against fiqh, against halal and food-safety regulation, and against real farm economics — which is precisely what these research tracks exist to do.
A proposed programme (2027–2030). Tracks are filled by open recruitment against published criteria. All figures are Awqaf New Zealand's own estimates, submitted for independent examination. No agreement has yet been concluded with any university; partners will be named once agreements are signed.
The commitments Awqaf New Zealand has honoured since its founding in 2011.
Since 2011, Awqaf New Zealand has never run a public fundraising appeal or solicited donations — in New Zealand or overseas — and does not seek them now. No appeals, no campaigns, no public collections. Our activity is sustained by waqf endowment and founders' contributions. Where friends of the organisation give their time, their skills, their services or an unsolicited gift, we accept it with gratitude and record it — but we ask no one for money.
Awqaf New Zealand sustains its work through the services it provides — such as its Qurbani programmes and the Salma humanitarian aid project delivered for the Government of Dubai — together with the support of close friends. We rely on neither public fundraising nor donation appeals; support that reaches us does so unasked.
Awqaf New Zealand engages only through official diplomatic and governmental channels — embassies, national waqf authorities, and recognised institutions. We do not pursue informal or unofficial routes.
Awqaf New Zealand publishes in five languages with six volunteers, assisted by AI tools made available under the nonprofit programmes of Anthropic (Claude), Google, AWS and Microsoft. We state this openly — responsibility for everything published remains Awqaf New Zealand's alone.
If you have a good waqf idea or a waqf innovation, we would love to hear from you. We're always glad to connect with innovators, scholars and institutions who share our belief in the power of waqf.