Funding the Sub-Saharan African Education Sector with Waqf: Experiences from al-Azhar University and Selected Universities in Malaysia

Abstract

Education is a fundamental human right. The UN has also made it as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals. Before the leading nations in the world today have drafted the laws and international treaties on the compulsion for governments to give access to education to every child Islam has already instructed mankind to seek for knowledge. Despite these divine and human encouragements, unfortunately, the world is still habouring about 57 million out-of-school children who are denied access to education due to factor mainly depending on lack of adequate funding. UNESCO’s statistics show that in the world’s total number of out-of-school children the Sub-Saharan Africa is home to the most alarming number, accounting for about 50% of them, a problem mainly attributed to low funding. Therefore alternative source of funding is inevitable. It is to this reason this paper aims at exploring waqf as a viable source of funding for education in the sub-Saharan Africa. This will be modeled on some selected universities like Al-Azhar and certain Malaysian universities.

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