National Transplant Resource Centre turned Ramadan zakat counters into organ-pledge asks

Malaysia's organ donation rate is among the lowest in the world. The National Transplant Resource Centre's brief to agency Naga DDB Tribal put the problem plainly: although Islamic teaching is widely understood to permit donation, most Malaysian Muslims — the country's majority — had pledged at far lower rates than other communities, held back by uncertainty over whether donating organs was religiously allowed.

Instead of another mass-media awareness drive, the campaign, run under the name 'Wakaf Organ', borrowed an existing act of obligatory giving. Every Ramadan, Muslims pay Zakat Fitrah, a compulsory charity, at counters set up inside mosques. Those counters became the campaign's gateway: while believers came to fulfil one duty, videos asked them to take on another — pledging their organs. The videos featured the Muftis of Kuala Lumpur, Johor and Perak, whose word settles such doubts, and ran at Friday prayers and at Iftar@KL, Kuala Lumpur's biggest Ramadan event.

The mechanism is a reframing. Organ donation stops being a contested hypothetical and becomes one more act of giving performed alongside an obligatory one, with the theological question answered in advance by the highest religious offices. The entry won a Merit at the 2018 Kancil Awards in the Kancil for Good: Direct category.

Ask for pledges at zakat counters, voiced by muftis

The audience was pre-assembled: Ramadan mosques gather precisely the demographic whose pledges were missing, at events they attend out of obligation.

The doubt was theological, so the messenger had to be theological: only the muftis could retire the question of whether donation is permitted.

Zakat reframed the ask. At the counter, giving is the purpose of the visit, so a pledge reads as a continuation of the visit's business rather than an interruption.

Religious hesitation does not yield to louder persuasion but to relocation: move the ask into a ritual the audience already performs, delivered by the authority it already trusts.

Malaysia's donor shortfall outlasted the campaign. By 2025 the NTRC still described organ donation rates as low, with more than 10,000 people on the transplant waiting list and a recent kidney transplant rate of 3 to 5 per million people — behind Thailand on 9 and Singapore on about 16. The NTRC director's 2025 diagnosis was unchanged in substance: raising public awareness of pledging remained the bottleneck.