The Applicability and Prospect of Cash Waqf Fund in Supporting Education and Healthcare in Ghana: An Exploratory Study(ARABIC)

Abstract

Waqf funds assist Muslim communities in addressing challenges, particularly those related to education and healthcare. Despite the importance of cash waqf funds to development, it has yet to be applied in Ghana. The Muslim community in Ghana faces many challenges in the education and health sectors. This research aims to develop a cash waqf fund model that can be applied in Ghana and be used to finance education and healthcare projects. The researcher used qualitative analysis with an inductive approach to extrapolate and derive rules related to the cash waqf and its applications; in addition, an analytical-descriptive approach was used to discover the challenges in the fields of education and healthcare in Muslim communities in Ghana and the possibility of applying the cash waqf fund in Ghana to address the challenges by conducting personal interviews with some experts and stakeholders, and the researcher also used thematic analysis to analyse the data. The study concluded with various findings, the essential being: The Islamic Education Unit, which manages the basic education and secondary sectors for the Ghanaian Muslim community, faces challenges that hinder it from achieving its goal, which is to provide quality education, and funding is the most important of these challenges. Moreover, the Ghanaian Muslim community also faces many challenges in the healthcare sector, which prompted Muslim doctors in Ghana to form an association that would enable them to provide healthcare services to the Ghanaian Muslim community. However, the lack of funding hindered the association from carrying out its work. Therefore, the proposed cash waqf model offers potential benefits for financing projects in education and health care sector.