The potential of crowdfunding platform in developing cash-waqf.

Waqf (endowment in Arabic) has the potential to alleviate social and economic issues such as poverty and unemployment. Traditionally, Waqf was confined to tangible and physical assets. However, we believe that Cash-Waqf (endowment of money) has been underutilized despite the significant social and economic impacts that it can have nowadays. Yet, Cash-waqf is facing several impediments such as fundraising that need to be resolved in order to ease its implementation and efficient usage. The main purpose of this research is to explore the potential of some technology solutions in solving the fundraising challenge. We implement a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews with six academicians and experts in Islamic finance and Fintech. Through our questionnaires, we try to learn their opinions about the issues facing cash-waqf and the potential of implementing particularly crowdfunding platform in order to address fundraising issue. The paper uses content analysis technique to interpret the data and verbatim quotes to discuss each research objective. Our results suggest that there is a great potential of applying crowdfunding technology to cash-waqf model. Nonetheless, there are still some challenges from the management perspective that need to be addressed for better efficiency