This month, the Trump administration announced nearly $2 billion for faith-based groups, the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based organizations in more than 20 years. The bulk of it, $1.4 billion, funds health services, including an $850 million award to World Vision supporting 2,500 faith-based hospitals and clinics across 17 countries.

Whatever the administration’s ultimate motives, this is an important signal to my public health and humanitarian relief colleagues. Even as the old aid architecture is collapsing, the faith economy is not. Washington has rediscovered faith as a delivery mechanism. The bigger opportunity is faith as a source of capital.

By faith economy, I mean not simply religious charities, but the capital generated, governed, and invested through religious obligations, institutions, and financial systems. Governments and international institutions have worked with faith-based organizations for decades, relying on them to deliver services where public systems cannot. What they have not built is the financial infrastructure to receive, aggregate, and deploy capital that faith itself produces.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based providers deliver a significant share of health care — in some countries, an estimated 30%–40%. But the capital generated through religious obligation sits outside the way development finance is counted. Official development assistance measures what donor governments spend; it was never designed to capture what believers give. As a result, some of the world’s oldest and most durable capital flows remain invisible to the institutions designing global financing.

Islamic finance offers perhaps the clearest illustration because its religious obligations, capital markets, and risk instruments already span the spectrum from household giving to sovereign finance. Zakat is its most familiar instrument: a recurring annual obligation, generally 2.5% of qualifying wealth. Estimates put the annual zakat pool at roughly $200 billion to $1 trillion. But zakat is also the least interesting part of the opportunity.

I’ve seen this before. As a final-year medical student, during Libya’s revolution, I built the Noor Campaign around religious leaders and institutions because they held forms of trust and moral authority that formal systems often did not. A decade later, I encountered the financial version of the same problem in maternal health. In 2022, I realized that despite billions given in zakat each year, no coordinated mechanism was directing it into maternal and newborn health. The need was enormous: Across OIC countries, maternal mortality remains more than 50% higher than the global average — 299 deaths per 100,000 live births against a global 197.

I knew the money was there; the architecture was not. So I created For Mama, now Every Pregnancy, the first zakat-approved Muslim collaborative dedicated to maternal and newborn health. It raised $13 million in its first campaign, and across three Ramadans it has mobilized more than $130 million from over 192,000 individual donors. More than 50 organizations now use it every year to mobilize zakat and Ramadan giving for moms and babies.

Others began to take faith-based solutions seriously before Donald Trump became a convert. The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) piloted its Refugee Zakat Fund in 2017 and built the governance around it: dedicated accounts, traceability, religious oversight, and independent compliance. The fund is now backed by 18 fatwas and scholarly endorsements, and UNHCR reports that its Islamic philanthropy work has supported more than 9.9 million people. The point is that a global institution standardized religious capital and made it usable at scale. UNICEF, IRC, IOM, and GiveDirectly have since built their own mechanisms for zakat or Islamic philanthropy.

But if development stops at zakat, it will have missed the larger opportunity.

Islamic finance already has instruments that operate far beyond philanthropy. Waqf— an irrevocable endowment under Islamic law — can endow health, education, and other public goods over generations; they can’t be dismantled unlike government aid budgets. Sovereign and thematic sukuk can finance hospitals, housing, and climate infrastructure. Sharia-compliant insurance and risk instruments can shift the cost of a disaster away from a government balance sheet before it happens.

At the sovereign level, this is no longer theoretical. Indonesia pioneered the world’s first sovereign green sukuk and has linked cash waqf directly to government securities. The opportunity is not simply to collect more religious charity. It is to connect capital that already has its own investors, institutions, rules, and sources of legitimacy to the financing needs governments are increasingly struggling to meet.

That matters because some of these instruments can perform functions otherwise financed through public budgets, concessional capital or emergency aid. A sovereign sukuk financing a hospital is not charity filling a temporary budget gap; it is public infrastructure financed through a different capital market. A waqf supporting a hospital over decades is not an emergency appeal; it is a durable source of financing for a public good.

What is missing is the connective tissue between these financial systems. Islamic finance has its own rules and standards; development finance has another set for reporting, rating, and measuring outcomes. They were not built to work together. Until governments, investors, scholars, and development institutions can agree on how eligibility, disclosure, and performance translate across them, much of this capital will remain difficult to deploy at scale. Predictable in aggregate is not yet programmable at scale. Whoever writes those standards sets the terms: which needs qualify, which institutions certify, which populations get counted.

Government does not disappear in this model. Its financing mix changes. Countries become less dependent on whether a foreign legislature preserves an aid line, and more able to draw from capital markets, permanent endowments, and domestic or transnational pools of faith-generated capital.

That is what makes the U.S. State Department’s recent announcement such a useful test. It confirms something the health sector already knows: Faith institutions can be formidable delivery infrastructure. Washington has now put nearly $2 billion behind that idea.

But it is still American money, dependent on American appropriations and political choices. The World Vision initiative alone depends on the availability of funds. And the consortium selected for that initiative is made up of Christian organizations. American Jewish World Service says it was not consulted and learned about the announcement from the State Department’s press release. Muslim organizations, meanwhile, have raised concerns about unequal access to federal security funding at home. Faith remains, in this model, a delivery channel whose support is determined by whoever holds political power.

Funding faith-based organizations is a procurement decision, dependent on whoever controls the purse. Building the architecture to receive faith-based capital is infrastructure.

Faith capital carries its own politics — donors impose conditions, institutions make choices about who deserves help, scholars disagree about what qualifies, and some interpretations are exclusionary toward women. Built badly, it can reproduce every exclusion the current architecture already practices.

But ignoring it does not make it disappear. This capital will continue to move through communities whether global health and development institutions engage with it or not. It can finance health, education, and resilience; it can also reinforce exclusion and practices those same institutions spend billions trying to change. The case for building the architecture around it is not that faith capital is purer money. It is already there, it does not rise and fall on the same political cycle as foreign aid, and properly designed, it can widen the pool of capital available for health and direct more of it toward better health outcomes rather than deeper inequity.

The sector has spent decades treating this capital as either invisible or suspicious. It is neither. It is underbuilt. And the people who build the architecture around it will decide who it serves.

Alaa Murabit is a medical doctor. She is a U.N. high-level commissioner on health, employment, and economic growth, and a Lancet-Georgetown commissioner on faith, trust, and health. She created the first zakat-approved Muslim collaborative for maternal and newborn health, Every Pregnancy, and founded Voice of Libyan Women.