The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) released a new mobile crowdfunding app Thursday that allows people around the world to donate money to help feed the 20,000 Syrian children who have fled to Jordan to escape the Syrian civil war.
ShareTheMeal encourages users to "share their meals" with Syrian children in Jordanian refugee camps by using their iPhone or Android smartphone to donate a minimum of 50 cents - enough to feed a child for one day, reports CNN.
One unique gamification feature of the app is that it allows users to compare their charity efforts to that of their Facebook friends, which could encourage people to donate even more, according to Forbes.
"'Share the meal' for us definitely is about growing the pie of people who contribute, and we are increasingly looking for partners in the private sector and individuals in the broader public to help us," Robert Opp, director of innovation and change management at the WFP, told Reuters.
WFP hopes its app can help the U.N. with its ambitious goal of ending world hunger by 2030.
"Young people want to be involved, and millennials are a demographic that WFP hasn't really engaged with in the past," Gerald Bourke, a WFP spokesman in New York, told CNN. "But clearly their support is key if we are to reach our goal of achieving zero hunger in 15 years."
The app, developed by a start-up in Berlin, was put through a trial run in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in June, and it significantly helped the WFP in its efforts to feed children in Africa, according to CNN.
"In those German-speaking countries, 120,000 people downloaded the app and we raised $850,000," said Bourke. "Thanks to that we were able to provide 1.7 million school meal to children in Lesotho."
WFP plans to use the app in more countries in the future, but for now, its campaign will be limited to feeding Syrian children in two refugee camps in Jordan, a country that has given asylum to more than 750,000 Syrian refugees, according to the U.N.'s refugee agency, UNHCR.
Officials believe that if they are able to alleviate hunger and improve living conditions in refugee camps and Syrian communities in countries like Jordan and Lebanon, they can encourage more Syrians not to embark on a risky migration to Europe, according to Reuters.
Since 2011, the Syrian civil war has left 300,000 people dead and displaced 10.6 million people, nearly half of the country's population, according to CNN.
The WFP is currently providing support to some 4 million of those people, as well as more than 1.3 million people who have take refuge in neighboring countries.
