Trading Futures

In this article, we explore what happens when idea(l)s of Islamic charity ( sadaqah ) and social enterprise converge within a low-cost public health clinic in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For both the clinic’s wealthy sponsors urban poor who use it, interpreting intervention as pious expression care toward or for-profit humanitarian venture meant extending different futures to poor. The ambiguous temporalities gifts commodities anticipated by benefactors beneficiaries involved challenges anthropological assumptions concerning marketizing effects neoliberal development interventions. Our ethnography revealed hesitancy among sponsors, managers, users endow with final interpretation, undermining its stated goal promoting privatization “responsibilization”