Endowment and Minors' Trust Foundation (Awqaf Dubai)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Endowment and Minors' Trust Foundation, known as Awqaf Dubai, was established as the Awqaf and Minors Affairs Foundation under Law No. 9 of 2007, a public corporation of the Government of Dubai. Its name paired two distinct mandates from the start: registering, managing and growing waqf endowments in the emirate, and separately overseeing the financial affairs of minors and incapacitated individuals, a combination that reads unusually until it is read as one institution built to protect assets it does not itself own, whether those assets belong to a religious endowment or to a child.

The Foundation was renamed to its present form under Law No. 17 of 2022, fifteen years after its founding law, without its underlying dual mandate changing. It holds sole or third-party supervisory responsibility over endowments established by both individuals and institutions in Dubai, and publishes its own annual endowment asset figures, a level of public disclosure the United Arab Emirates' other emirates, each administering waqf separately, do not uniformly match.

The 2022 rename left the institution's substance, a single Dubai public corporation guarding both waqf endowments and minors' financial interests, unchanged beneath a new name.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Awqaf Dubai announced that Dubai's total endowment assets reached 13.5 billion UAE dirhams in 2025, a 22 percent increase from 11.1 billion dirhams the year before, held across 1,294 endowments established by 604 endowers, a figure the Foundation itself publishes rather than one an outside auditor supplies. The growth rate alone says the endowment sector is expanding, but the breakdown the Foundation released says more about who is doing the giving.

Of the 2025 total, assets established by men reached 7.9 billion dirhams, by women 1.3 billion dirhams and institutional endowments 4.3 billion dirhams, a split in which men's individual giving still outweighs women's by roughly six to one even as institutional endowments now approach a third of the whole. By asset class, 12 billion dirhams sat in real estate against 1.5 billion in financial assets, meaning Dubai's waqf wealth is still overwhelmingly land and property rather than portfolios of stocks or funds.

This figure covers Dubai alone; the other six emirates, including Abu Dhabi with its own separate Endowments and Minors' Funds Authority, are not surveyed here.