“1 Billion Meals Endowment” Initiative Strengthens the Role of Waqf in the Service of Sustainable Development
The UAE attaches great importance to activating the Waqf’s role in serving the Sustainable Development Goals and strengthening its tributaries.
This can be achieved either through legislative frameworks or through the launch of projects and initiatives that maintain endowment allocations and enable whites to contribute to meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged groups.
The UAE is one of the most prominent countries that restored the spirit, status and importance of endowment through the issuance of federal and local laws that regulate and support endowment. Among the most prominent of these laws is Federal Law No. 5 of 2018 on endowment, which keeps pace with the latest legislative developments and global changes. The endowment is transformed into one of the economic and social pillars contributing to the development process, in order to provide an appropriate and stimulating environment to develop endowment work and transform it into development work that contributes to education, health, culture, environmental and other fields, in addition to the promotion of innovative ideas and methods.
To care for and preserve endowments, institutions and bodies were established in the UAE to manage and invest endowment funds, and to commemorate, advocate and develop endowments and endowments. These objectives are enlightened through contemporary methods that are consistent with the purposes of Islamic law, which strengthen the well-being of members of society, embody the principles of social solidarity, and open up development horizons for charitable work in a way that benefits individuals and society.
The state’s efforts to instill a culture of endowment in society continued, with educational content being added to tenth grade students to promote endowment and its importance in achieving sustainable development. The students also know the role of endowment in the United Arab Emirates, which is considered the leading country in the fields of charity and humanitarian work.
One of the most innovative initiatives in the field of endowment is the “1 Billion Meals Endowment” campaign launched by Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. The campaign is launching the Stand-by Fund for Sustainable Food to combat hunger in many countries of the world.
The Endowment Fund for Food Nutrition echoes the words of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE vice president, prime minister and ruler of Dubai: “We are opening the doors of good to the people of good and aspire to be the people who stand most in the service of humanity.”
The Endowment Fund for Food Rations, which coincides with the holy month of Ramadan, aims to mobilize the largest local, regional and international effort to provide a food safety net to the most needy communities, in addition to contributing to the creation of mechanisms and the activation of plans and programs to combat and eliminate hunger within a sustainable institutional framework.
The Fund also aims to revive the Endowment Year in its sustainable development concept, contribute to the global efforts to eliminate hunger as one of the most important sustainable development goals, and develop the broadest community action that contributes to achieving the campaign’s goals of providing aid and food to tens of millions of people around the world.
The “1 Billion Meals Endowment” campaign opens a new door for giving and giving to institutions, companies, businessmen, well-known humanitarian figures and individuals who are able to contribute to the campaign. This consolidates the endowment’s culture in UAE society, which is a solid Arab cultural heritage, a human resource and a civilized source of development that is reserved for the future of generations and ensures sustainability through endowment funds in support of various development and community plans and projects.
The FFF represents a qualitative initiative that helps expand the base of charitable and humanitarian work to include a larger number of segments of the population in need, in addition to consolidating the values of solidarity and mutual support in their broader and broader sense. The FFF allows everyone from all backgrounds to contribute to charitable work, which promotes the sustainability of good and giving, embodies the principles of social solidarity, and opens up development horizons for charitable work to benefit individuals and society.
The “1 Billion Meals Endowment” campaign is consistent with the UAE’s vision to institutionalize and sustain charity work, which benefits the most needy communities around the world. The campaign also represents a qualitative leap in the field of charitable and humanitarian work worldwide, as it adopts the principle of organized collective action with the aim of uniting efforts to achieve food security for the most vulnerable groups as a key to social stability in all countries.
Endowments are among the best objects of spending adopted by our religion to achieve social and humanitarian solidarity and provide permanent sources of funding for spending on all benevolence and the most needy segments of society. Endowments, along with the imposition of zakat and charity, are considered one of the economic systems on which Islam relied to build a society that guarantees each other and helps those who are capable of it with many diverse means that preserve human dignity.
The endowment system is also an important foundation for comprehensive development in its various economic and social dimensions, as the endowment has made significant contributions to the progress and prosperity of Islamic civilization.
