What Islamic finance offers fundraisers seeking viable alternatives.
As movements worldwide seek alternatives to extractive economics beyond GDP, relatively few are engaging with one major system that already exists.
Islamic finance is a financial system that manages USD $8 trillion today – which is projected to reach USD $12 trillion by 2030. And it already operates on principles that new economy advocates call for.
Equity-based, asset-backed, ethical, sustainable, and environmentally- and socially-responsible, Islamic finance prohibits interest-based debt that forces unsustainable growth, and mandates wealth circulation through a 2.5% annual wealth tax. Investment must be tied to real economic activity, filtering out speculation, and the system requires risk-sharing partnerships in which financiers and communities succeed or fail together. These are not aspirational goals, but operational requirements that already govern thousands of institutions serving 1.8 billion people.
In this workshop, you will explore what funders and fundraisers outside of this tradition can learn from its principles:
- How the prohibition on interest changes the relationship between capital and time
- How mandatory circulation prevents wealth concentration
- How risk-sharing aligns funder and grantee incentives
- And how asset-backing keeps finance connected to real community impact
You’ll also learn how principles alone do not create a perfect system. Despite its principles, which are embedded in economic and theological policy, less than 3% of Islamic finance flows toward climate and nature solutions. A system designed around stewardship, balance, and harm avoidance struggles to fund planetary wellbeing at scale.
This paradox is a mirror for every organisation claiming transformative values while resources flow elsewhere. If principles alone were sufficient, Islamic finance would (and should) lead the world in climate investment. It does not. Understanding why reveals the systemic, institutional, and human factors that keep money misaligned with values: knowledge gaps, institutional inertia, power dynamics, and the distance between governance frameworks and operational incentives. Factors that operate in every funding ecosystem.
But what does this mean for how organisations actually fund their work today? And how these principles influence funding models, income strategies, or financial decision-making in practice?
You’ll leave the session with practical frameworks you can apply regardless of your own context, tools to audit gaps between your organisation’s stated values and actual resource allocation, and clarity on the first move you can make to close one gap when you return to your work.
Learning outcomes
- Explore transferable principles from an existing alternative economic system, including wealth circulation, risk-sharing, and asset-backing
- Analyse why principles alone do not redirect capital, identifying the systemic, institutional, and human factors that maintain harmful resource flows despite good intentions
- Identify gaps between your organisation’s values and resource allocation, leave with a concrete first step to begin closing it, and gain awareness of partnership opportunities and alternative funding models to explore further