Identifying Factors that Affect Awareness of Gold and Silver Zakat: A Study among Public Servants in Kedah
Noor Hasnita Abdul Talib, Jasmin Ilyani Binti Ahmad, Muhammad Saiful Islam Ismail, Farahdina Fazial

Abstract
Zakat is one of pathway to Islamic community growth. Implementing Zakat distribution effectively and efficiently can lead to improvements in the overall socioeconomic situation. Despite this, the gold and silver zakat collection still ranks lower than other zakat collections. To boost gold and silver zakat collection, one of the approaches is to raise awareness about gold and silver zakat among Muslims. There are various factors that can influence this awareness, including religious obligations, knowledge, attitudes, and subjective norms. Thus, this paper aims to identify the factors that influence the awareness of gold and silver zakat among public servants in Kedah. Multiple regression analysis was used to study the influence between awareness of gold and silver zakat with factors such as attitudes, religious obligations, subjective norms, and knowledge. The analysis shows the results that the variables of religious obligation, knowledge and subjective norms influence the awareness of gold and silver zakat among public servants in Kedah. However, there are also variables that do not affect that awareness, which is an attitude that indicates a negative relationship towards the awareness of gold and silver zakat. Based on the findings of the study, it can be concluded that any strategy by zakat institutions to improve zakat collection needs to focus on increasing knowledge, a sense of responsibility towards religion and the influence of the surrounding community. These can be done by improving the dissemination of zakat in-formation through various methods including user-friendly counter services, web based and mobile apps which is increasingly popular among users in the community.

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