Inspired by effective altruism, Imaanity is providing African Muslims and Christians a platform that allows them to make more impact with their zakat and tithes.
What Is Zakat?
Zakat is derived from the Arabic words for “purification” and “growth”. It is one of the five pillars of Islam and is foundational to the faith along with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and the declaration of faith. In no way is zakat a voluntary charity that may or may not be done. It is an obligatory act of worship that purifies your wealth, acknowledges that all provision comes from Allah, and guarantees that your prosperity will reach the most vulnerable members of the Muslim community.
Unlike Sadaqah, which a believer gives freely and at will, Zakat is a defined obligation with a defined calculation. Every sane, adult Muslim who possesses wealth above a certain threshold, and has held that wealth for a complete lunar year, must pay it.
Who Must Pay Zakat?
You are required to pay Zakat if you meet all of the following: you are a sane, adult Muslim; your assets exceed your immediate debts; and you have possessed wealth above the nisab threshold for one full lunar year.
The nisab is the minimum amount of wealth that makes Zakat obligatory. It is calculated against the value of either gold (87.48 grams) or silver (612.36 grams). The figure fluctuates, and you should confirm the current value with local Islamic authorities before calculating. The threshold exists precisely to protect those still building their financial footing: only those with clear surplus wealth are obligated to give.
Zakat becomes due immediately upon completing one full lunar year of holding wealth above the nisab. Many Muslims choose to pay during Ramadan for the additional blessing. But you may pay whenever your personal Zakat year concludes. Scholars differ on whether early payment is permissible; when in doubt, consult a qualified scholar in your community.
Separately from annual Zakat (Zakat al-Mal), there is Zakat al-Fitr, a smaller, fixed amount due from every Muslim household before Eid prayers at the end of Ramadan. It is equivalent to the cost of one meal per household member, regardless of their age or individual wealth.
How to Calculate Your Zakat
Calculating Zakat begins with an honest accounting of all your zakatable assets and then subtracting what you legitimately owe.
What to include: All liquid cash, including money at home, in bank accounts, or owed to you by others. All savings, including emergency funds and investment accounts. Gold and silver in any form: jewellery, coins, bullion. Business assets including inventory, goods held for trade, and business cash. Stocks, shares, and other financial instruments. Investment properties, excluding the home you live in.
What you may deduct: Debts that must be repaid within the next 12 months. Up to 12 months’ worth of instalments on longer-term debts. Overdue payments and arrears.
What you may not deduct: Bills not yet due. Interest payments, since riba is haram. The full outstanding balance of long-term loans like mortgages or student loans. Only the portion currently due or overdue may be deducted.
The formula itself is straightforward:
Total Zakatable Assets − Deductible Liabilities = Net Zakatable Wealth
If that figure meets or exceeds the nisab, you owe 2.5% of it as Zakat.
Example: Net zakatable wealth of ₦20,000,000 × 0.025 = ₦500,000 due.
One Tithe Is Actually Three
Most Christians grow up hearing about the tithe, that is, 10% of income, given to the church. After this, the conversation is often abandoned. That is not wrong. But it is incomplete. The Old Testament tithing system was more layered than a single percentage, and understanding its full architecture helps modern believers think more carefully about the scope of their giving.
The ancient Israelite system contained three distinct tithes.
Levitical Tithe
The first was the Levitical, or sacred tithe. This was given to the priests and temple for the service of God and the community of faith. This is the tithe traced back to Abraham in Genesis, the one that carries across both Testaments, and the one that remains the baseline for Christian giving today. Ten percent of your income, given consistently, given first, to support the proclamation of the gospel and the life of your local church.
Tithe of the Feasts
The second was the tithe of the feasts, described in Deuteronomy 14:22–27. It was a tithe set aside over time to fund the family’s journey to Jerusalem for religious festivals. It was a mandated provision for communal worship, rest, and celebration. The Levitical law required Jewish families to travel to Jerusalem on certain occasions, and this second tithe ensured they could do so without financial strain.
One scholar described it as resembling a Christmas Club savings system, only with deeper religious meaning. The lesson is not that Christians must replicate this exactly. It is that the ancient framework built in provision for spiritual renewal: for the kind of deliberate withdrawal from ordinary life that keeps faith alive. That principle does not expire.
Neighbour’s Tithe
The third tithe is the one most directly relevant to this conversation. Described in Deuteronomy 14:28–29 and confirmed by both the book of Tobit and the Jewish historian Josephus, it was given every third year. It was set aside in each town for the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.
Josephus recorded it plainly: beyond the two annual tithes, every third year an additional tithe was distributed to widowed women and orphan children. Crucially, the distribution was not left to individual whim. It was a community-wide project to which everyone contributed and from which the most vulnerable benefited.
Summarized, the Old Testament vision of giving moved across three relationships: toward God, toward your own spiritual formation, and toward your neighbour’s concrete need. That is a far more expansive framework than most Christian giving conversations reflect.
New Testament
The tithe is sometimes treated as an Old Testament institution that the New Testament quietly retires. But the trajectory of the New Testament actually moves in the opposite direction. Not necessarily away from generosity, but toward a deeper and even more costly version of it.
The early church in Acts did not simply maintain the tithe. They pooled resources across economic lines. Paul spent significant portions of his letters coordinating relief funds across churches in different cities. These funds not for buildings, but for people in need. James, in language that carries a bracing directness, says that faith without works is dead, and he makes the care of the vulnerable his primary exhibit. Jesus himself, in Matthew 25, places the care of the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned at the centre of how his followers will ultimately be evaluated.
The mandate to care for those in poverty is not an optional extension of Christian practice. It is embedded in the faith’s most foundational texts. And yet many Christians give generously to their church and almost nothing beyond it. This is often not out of indifference, but because they have never been given a framework that makes the gap between their giving and their calling visible.
The three-tithe framework does that. It does not ask whether you feel moved to give. Instead, it asks whether you have set aside the portion that is not yours to keep.
Does Your Giving Do What You Think It Does?
Being diligent about your giving as a religious person means asking not just how much but to what effect. And this is where the modern evidence-based giving movement becomes deeply relevant to any serious Christian donor.
The distance between a charity’s stated mission and its actual impact is frequently wider than donors know. An organization can be sincerely motivated, competently managed, and genuinely popular and still fail to produce meaningful change in the metrics that matter.
An intervention that distributes textbooks is not the same as one that demonstrably improves literacy. Providing meals is not the same as lifting households out of poverty. Without rigorous measurement, a donor cannot distinguish between these outcomes. They see a compelling story, an annual report full of numbers, and assume that good intention equals good result.
Giving Where It Counts
For zakat, arriving at an accurate number is the work most people avoid. This is so not because they are unwilling, but because tracking down every asset category and applying the correct deductions takes time and careful thought. Imaanity removes that friction entirely. Its digital Zakat calculator walks you through your complete financial picture in seconds, covering everything from liquid cash to illiquid assets, so you arrive at your precise obligation without guesswork or omission.
For Christian tithers, Imaanity provides a level of participation not available in their local churches. As an evidence-based giving platform, it built on the principle that donors deserve to know whether their giving is actually working.
- Imaanity independently assesses NGO partners on the ground in Nigeria across the categories where need is most acute: poverty relief, healthcare, education, clean water, emergency response, and support for women, children, and families.
- Its digital system delivers traceability from donation to delivery, verified outcomes, not anecdotes and ongoing visibility over time
- They cover operational costs independently. This way, they ensure that 100% of donated funds reach their partner organisations.
- They provide faith-aligned giving options like tithes and zakat.
- Seamless and convenient payment options.
- Donors can direct contributions to specific regions rather than undifferentiated pools.
- Donors can also track the impact of their giving in real time. Real-time tracking is what transforms a donation from a transaction into a relationship with outcomes. It is the mechanism that keeps the question alive: is this working? It is the same question that RCTs ask at scale, that Imaanity makes available to individual donors at the level of their own contribution.
Visit imaanity.com to get started today.
