The Islamic Finance Research Institute of Ghana (IFRIG) recently launched its latest research work on Zakat, a structured fund collection and distribution module which is one of five pillars of the Islamic faith. The 70-page document with five chapters is titled: 'Zakat: A tool for poverty alleviation in Ghana.' According to IFRIG's Director of Audit and Governance, Musah Ismaila, research has proven to be a strong foundation on which any meaningful policy must be built, hence the Institute's strategic research papers in particular communities and sectors over the years. "There is a reason the word 'research' is in our nomenclature; the role of research cannot be underemphasized especially where the state or an organization is seeking to allocate resources for the public good or more specifically for poverty alleviation. "It is why this report was undertaken to explore how best we can leverage on scientific data to guide policy. This report helped review Zakat operations elsewhere and to propose international best practices of how it can be used to improve the lot of the needy in our part of the world. "Funds if they are misapplied will sink people deeper into poverty," he stressed, adding that the failure of poverty alleviation modules rolled out by successive governments could be partly down to lack of feasibility studies before their roll out. The report had 500 respondents, with data collected proportionally from across all 16 regions through online questionnaires, i.e. Computer Assisted Web Interviews (CAWI) and paper-based questionnaires for data collectors deployed to hard-to-reach areas.