“A note to future effective charity founders: consider zakat compliance from the start” by Kaleem

I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. A quick note aimed at people going through AIM's incubation programme (or otherwise founding new effective charities), though it may be of broader interest. I think designing for zakat compliance is an underexplored lever, and being intentional about it early could open up a range of interventions and orgs that wouldn't otherwise get considered. These might not be the most cost-effective options relative to current best-in-class charities, but they have two attractive properties: they're potentially more (or at least differently) scalable, and they aren't competing for the same pool of funding. Zakat is restricted funding, so a zakat-compliant org is tapping a largely separate source rather than dividing the existing effective-giving pie. The catch is that very few effective charities work on interventions, or in the locations and with muslim-super-majority populations, that could feasibly be zakat-compliant. New Incentives, Spiro, Taimaka, and First Embrace are among the plausible candidates (in addition to GiveDirectly who sometimes run zakat-compliant programs). But even where eligibility is conceivable, none of them are actually compliant right now. A [...] --- First published: June 22nd, 2026 Source: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .