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.
