The Role of Zakat in Poverty Reduction in Bangladesh from a Community Social Work Perspective

Poverty is an epidemic that is challenging the entire Muslim world including Bangladesh. Zakat is widely recognized as one of the tools to combat poverty. While zakat is a key mechanism in Islamic faith to eradicate poverty, its formal implementation began during the epoch of Abu Bakar, the immediate successor of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). Zakat is a mechanism and social work is the practice of assisting people to solve poverty and make social change at the community, organizational, and international levels. This paper contends that Bangladesh should incorporate zakat, whilst social work is knowledge for poverty reduction and the overall development strategies. Drawing distinct dichotomous between these two, this paper contends that if used effectively, they can play an important role of wealth redistribution to enable as well as empower the poor to be more independent and to generate income. This paper examines the role and implementation strategies of zakat to effectively eradicate poverty and provide avenues for the generation of income.