When you donate to a project, you want to understand what has been delivered. A completion figure becomes useful when you know the project, target, time period and definition of “complete.”
We compared five high project-completion scores with the actual activities described for each charity. The result shows why a recurring scholarship, a restored building and a water project need different definitions of delivery, even when their assessment scores are similar.
These are stored assessment scores, not independently verified completion percentages. We excluded scores marked estimated. The retained records still describe existing assessments rather than newly verified rates.
Completion is not the whole recommendation
| Charity | Transparency score (%) | Program score (%) | Overhead score (%) | Completion score (%) | Halal score /10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Noor Aid | 62% | 80% | 20% | 95% | 7.6 |
| Lembaga Zakat Selangor | 90% | 86% | 14% | 95% | 7.8 |
| Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia | 90% | 78% | 22% | 95% | 7.8 |
| Aga Khan Trust for Culture | 92% | 92% | 8% | 95% | 8.4 |
| MATW | 91% | 97% | 3% | 97% | 8.7 |
Program, overhead, transparency and completion values are stored 0 to 100 assessment scores shown as percentages. They are not audited financial ratios, guarantees about how donations are spent or observed project-completion rates. All five records have Pass for funding, connection and legal screening within the recorded scope.
Noor Aid's 95% completion score sits beside 62% transparency, illustrating why one attractive metric is not enough. Aga Khan Trust for Culture combines the same completion score with 92% transparency and 8.4/10 halal. MATW has the highest halal and completion scores, 8.7/10 and 97%, so its leading position has support across more than the metric used for the countdown. Programme purpose still differs substantially between these organizations.
5. Noor Aid: score 95
The profile lists active Water Well Projects and African School Support.
The wells are listed in The Gambia, while school support spans multiple locations. That mix includes both infrastructure and continuing assistance. A well may reach a handover point; support for a school may recur each year. Noor Aid's 95 is therefore a positive completion assessment, but the active labels do not establish that 95 out of every 100 wells have been handed over.
4. Lembaga Zakat Selangor: score 95
Listed work includes Zakat distribution, education scholarships and economic empowerment for eligible recipients.
Distribution, scholarships and economic empowerment are all listed in Selangor. These are recurring services, so “complete” needs a unit: an application processed, a grant distributed or an annual cycle finished. Its score of 95 should not be read as a claim that ongoing poverty-relief work itself is almost finished. For a donor, the relevant question is whether the promised support reaches eligible recipients within the stated period.
3. Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia: score 95
Its projects include Skim Pembiayaan Ikhtiar and borrower capacity-building training.
Its mission concerns interest-free microfinance, particularly for women in poor Malaysian households. Financing and borrower training are intended to work together: access to capital addresses one constraint, while capacity-building addresses another. A score of 95 is relevant to delivery assessment, but it does not measure loan repayment, business survival or household income growth. Those would require separate outcome evidence.
2. Aga Khan Trust for Culture: score 95
Historic Cairo Revitalization and Central Asian Heritage Conservation are listed as ongoing projects.
Both are ongoing, which is consistent with a long-term, phased programme rather than necessarily contradicting the score of 95. A building or conservation phase can be finished while a wider regeneration programme continues. The case for this charity is its heritage-and-quality-of-life purpose; the completion score alone does not tell a donor how much historic fabric was restored or how local livelihoods changed.
1. MATW Project: score 97
Its profile lists the Togo Development Center as completed and Orphan Education as ongoing.
The completed Togo center is the clearest named completion example among these five descriptions. That is why MATW's leading score of 97 has more concrete project context here than a score alone would provide. Its continuing orphan education also shows that an organization can have both completed infrastructure and intentionally ongoing services. We cannot infer a denominator or a count of all completed projects from the score.
What would count as evidence of delivery?
What the numbers tell us: MATW leads this group by 2 points; the other four are tied at 95. There is no basis for treating the order within that tie as evidence of more reliable delivery. The meaningful differences are the programmes being assessed: water and schools, recurring Zakat, microfinance, and phased conservation.
Then ask four questions: what was promised, what was delivered, over which period, and how was the result checked?
Zakat+ connects project descriptions with research metrics and Pro financial comparison. That makes the score more useful: a completed well, an ongoing scholarship programme and a multi-stage restoration project can be considered on their own terms instead of being treated as identical units.
Several other profiles share a score of 95. The order among those ties is alphabetical, not evidence that one delivers more reliably than another.
Sources
The project names and scores come from the same research snapshot used throughout this collection. They describe recorded projects and assessment values, not a new audit of physical delivery.
- MATW financial-document source
- A financial document is not itself proof of the completion-score methodology.
