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U.N. ShareTheMeal App Enables You To Feed A Syrian Child At 50 Cents A Day

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Nov 16, 2015 02:14 PM EST

There is one interesting United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) that has launched a new mobile crowdfunding app Thursday, enabling people to donate money globally, so that they can feed 20,000 Syrian children who have escaped to Jordan from the Syrian civil war.

The new app calls for users to "share their meals" with Syrian children in various refugee camps, so that they can go through their iPhone or Android smartphones in order to donate some 50 cents. One donation could help to feed one child for one day, reports CNN.

A unique gamification aspect of the app is to make users pit their own charity efforts with their Facebook friends, which would encourage people to donate more through this feature.

"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.

The target is to eliminate 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."

A start-up in Berlin began the app and put it through a trial run in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in June, which enabled the WFP 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."

Currently, the app will feed only a few Syrian children in a couple of refugee camps in Jordan---one country that gives asylum to more than 750,000 Syrian refugees, according to the U.N.'s refugee agency, UNHCR.

By improving the living conditions in camps and communities in a few nations such as Jordan and Lebanon, they can lay the foundation at least for refugees not to emigrate to Europe, according to Reuters.

The Syrian civil war has left 300,000 dead and displaced 10.6 million, nearly half the country's population, according to CNN.

Currently, the WFP is helping to support 4 million of them, along with more than 1.3 million refugees in nearby nations.

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