Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
Rescuing a person from the darkness of ignorance, saving someone’s health from hazardous threat to his life, providing a homeless person with a house, saving a poor family from poverty and providing them with a better living standards are all forms of emancipation of slaves after abolishing slavery.
Answering your question, Dar Al-Ifta Al-Misriyyah, states:
The issue of emancipation from slavery which was one of the most praise worthy acts of worship through which one draws near to Allah does not exist in our modern times as the door of slavery was sealed in the 19th century with the consensus and approval of the Islamic world.
However the interpretation of emancipation from slavery could have various meanings away from the confinement of the term to freeing enslaved people.
In our modern times, the term could very well apply in the case of rescuing a person from the darkness of ignorance to dwell in the light of knowledge and education. The same goes in the case of saving someone’s health from hazardous threat to his life, by the same token providing a homeless person with a house in which he/she finds a shelter from the wilderness of street life is a noble act, also when we reach out to save a poor family from poverty and provide them with a better living standards, we are saving their lives from falling prey to despair and death.
The list is endless as all kinds of saving and rescuing of people’s lives from danger is an act of emancipation worthy of praise and abundantly rewarded by Allah the Almighty.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Source: http://www.dar-alifta.org/Foreign/ViewFatwa.aspx?ID=10506