Fragmented Aid: The Institutionalization of the OIC’s Foreign Aid Framework

Although the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was not established with the explicit purpose of providing aid to the world’s underprivileged, its founders were motivated, at least in part, by a wish to impersonate and enhance “Islamic solidarity” in the face of widespread poverty in Muslimmajority countries (İhsanoğlu 2010:3). Diverse OIC institutions emerged, including the Islamic Development Bank (1975), the Islamic Solidarity Fund (1974), and the Islamic Centre for Development of Trade (1981), dealing with both humanitarian and developmental concerns (Kayaoglu 2015:17). These entities signaled an initiative to address the wide range of needs and, progres-sively, to align aid with the third generation of human rights—rights to eco-nomic and social development (Iqbal 2007). Thus, only recently did the OIC stress again the need to ensure the “right to development” for members of the umma.