The Institute for Islamic Finance (IIF) of the Asian School of Governance is a global platform for advancing Islamic finance as an instrument for public value, institutional innovation, and social impact.

The Institute connects Islamic finance, governance, sustainability, and real-world implementation, bringing together governments, financial institutions, investors, universities, Shariah scholars, development organizations, and project developers.

Its focus is practical: helping move promising ideas from financial concepts to functioning institutions, investable projects, and scalable financing ecosystems.

Why Islamic Finance?

Islamic finance offers more than an alternative set of financial products. Its principles of risk sharing, asset-backed financing, ethical investment, and social responsibility provide powerful foundations for addressing contemporary development challenges.

Yet significant gaps remain between the availability of Islamic capital and the projects, institutions, and communities that could benefit from it.

The Institute works to close this gap.

People → Institutions → Transactions → Ecosystems

What We Do

Islamic Finance Leadership

Executive education and action-learning programs for government leaders, financial professionals, development practitioners, academics, and project developers.

Programs explore Islamic finance not only as a technical field, but as a leadership, governance, and institutional challenge.

Sukuk & Project Finance Lab

A platform for developing real-world Shariah-compliant financing opportunities.

Applications may include:

• health and hospitals

• renewable energy

• water and sanitation

• sustainable agriculture

• affordable housing

• education

• infrastructure

• climate resilience

Teams work toward tangible financing pathways, from project concepts and feasibility to institutional arrangements, transaction structures, and investor propositions.

Islamic Social Finance

The Institute explores how zakat, waqf, sadaqah, qard hasan, and other Islamic social finance mechanisms can address poverty, health, education, livelihoods, food security, humanitarian needs, and community development.

A key area of inquiry is how traditional Islamic institutions can interact with contemporary governance, technology, impact measurement, and sustainable financing models.

Islamic Climate & Sustainable Finance

Islamic finance can play a growing role in financing the transition toward resilient and low-carbon economies.

The Institute develops knowledge and initiatives around:

• green and sustainability sukuk

• renewable energy

• climate adaptation

• resilient infrastructure

• sustainable food systems

• nature and biodiversity

• just energy transitions

Action-Research Fellowships

The Institute convenes multidisciplinary fellows around real financing and institutional challenges.

Rather than ending with research papers alone, fellows work toward practical outcomes:

Challenge → Action Research → Prototype → Financing Structure → Investable Opportunity → Scale

Potential programs include Sukuk Development Fellows, Islamic Climate Finance Fellows, Islamic Social Finance Fellows, and Islamic Health Finance Fellows.

A Global Learning Network

Islamic finance operates across highly diverse institutional environments, from mature financial centers to emerging ecosystems where Islamic finance is only beginning to develop.

The Institute connects practitioners and institutions across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and other regions so that experience can move across countries while solutions remain grounded in local contexts.

Universities can serve as important nodes in this network, convening governments, financial institutions, communities, researchers, and investors around locally relevant opportunities.

Our Approach

The Institute combines Islamic finance expertise with the Asian School of Governance's approaches to adaptive leadership, systems innovation, institutional design, problem-driven iterative adaptation, and action-research.

This allows the Institute to work on a question often overlooked in finance:

What needs to change in the surrounding system for a promising financial instrument to actually work?

The result is an approach that develops not only financial products, but the leadership, institutions, partnerships, project pipelines, and ecosystems required to make them viable.

Building the Next Generation of Islamic Finance

The Institute envisions Islamic finance as an increasingly important source of capital for solving public and development challenges.

Its ambition is to help build a global community capable of connecting:

Islamic principles + innovative finance + capable institutions + investable projects + measurable development impact

From Islamic capital to development impact.

The Institute for Islamic Finance invites universities, governments, financial institutions, investors, Shariah scholars, development organizations, and practitioners to collaborate in building and testing the next generation of Islamic finance solutions.