Fintech Driven Tax Justice: Facilitating Redistribution with Zakat Led Socio-economic Improvement
Keywords:
development, Kenya, redistribution, zakatAbstract
Unpaid care work and working in the informal sector have restricted women’s access to finance. These money restrictions are partly because of cultural barriers framing gender roles, and institutions structured towards a service economy that is under representative of women. Also, the market’s emphasis on minimum state intervention and freedom of trade and capital has steered redistribution away from addressing gender related socio-economic inequalities. Redistribution has instead been fostered to stimulate the growth of private markets, and to provide to entrepreneurs a path for socio-economic mobility. It has created gendered wealth and income asymmetries and deepened gender inequalities in accessing finance. Can fintech, arguably the next iteration of development models, bridge this inequality gap? Should tax justice continue to be construed from a public finance perspective where taxes collected are not always used to provide commensurate public benefits to citizens? Or can tax justice be purposively construed to include religious tax practices inspired under an exogenous religiously inspired fiscal system, for example Islam? Relatedly, can Muslim non-state actors also subservient to the exogenous Islamic fiscal system facilitate redistribution using the available religious funds transmitted through fintech? Redistributive taking under the Islamic fiscal system operational as part of the collective consciousness of the Muslim community should be analysed as part of the conceptual framework that explains what tax justice means. This paper attempts to explore how the concept of redistribution can be examined using the Islamic wealth tax. It shall explain how a faith-based organisation in Nairobi matches the Islamic wealth tax to meet development needs of women looking for financial access to improve their economic well-being. The nexus between tax and redistribution is advanced here by broadening the state-centric understanding of tax to drawing in the Islamic funds purposively paid out for socio-economic improvements.
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