The Role of Zakāh in providing Health Care for the Poor in Sudan

Abstract

Despite the relatively long experience of zakāh in social protection and poverty alleviation in Sudan, there is little evidence on its role in facilitating access to health care services to the poor. This paper investigated the role of zakāh office (Diwān Az-Zakāh)  in providing health care for the poor in Sudan. The study used administrative and primary data collected from two Sudanese states in 2018. Adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods, the results indicate that zakāh helped a considerable segment of poor families to access health care services, through enrolling them into health insurance coverage and paying treatment costs for poor patients. The quantitative analysis revealed that zakāh beneficiaries have a higher likelihood to access health care compared to non-zakāh beneficiaries. This implies that zakāh reduces out of pocket health expenditures for poor households, hence protecting them from the risk of catastrophic health expenditure. The qualitative analysis based on key informant interviews indicated that zakāh office allocates a huge fund to finance health care for poor households and significantly contributes to universal health coverage in Sudan. The study recommends that enhancing cooperation between the chamber of zakāh and health insurance fund would stimulate the role of zakāh in providing health care for the underprivileged. In addition, the Sudanese zakāh experiment may provide useful lessons to other Muslim-majority countries on providing the poor access to health care services.