Away from Crescent's daily affairs and former political and media engagements, Ijaz has served on the College Foundation Board of Trustees at the University of Virginia, and he serves on the advisory board of the Rebuilding Afghanistan Foundation. RAF raises funds for building education infrastructure and programs in Afghanistan, including the construction of schools such as Mayar Elementary School, which enrolled 400 boys and girls from Maidan Wardak Province upon opening in late 2005. During the mid-1990s, Ijaz supported Developments in Literacy, an initiative to build and operate elementary schools in rural Pakistan as alternatives to the religious schools in which many Pakistani children were being radicalized. The group did not seek to create a secularized school system; its goal was to teach the Qur'an as one of many subjects rather than as the only subject. Ijaz and his wife Valérie also serve as goodwill ambassadors for a British charity, Children of Peace, that works to reconcile differences between Palestinian and Israeli youth. In late 2011, while addressing the World Peace Festival, a peace conference held in Berlin, Ijaz announced an intention to donate 1% of his net worth to create a Humanitarian Relief Fund that would make an effort to alleviate the root causes of poverty. In noting his belief that governments have often failed to provide assistance to the poor in sufficient ways over the long term, Ijaz sought similar pledges for the proposed fund from other philanthropists.
