UNICEF makes smartphone app that’s actually useful

Responding to the constantly-connected, 24-7 smartphone-checking culture of consumptive tech, UNICEF has put together an app that encourages its users to put down their phones, so that children around the world can have something they actually can’t live without: water. For every 10 minutes of a phone’s inactivity, the donors to UNICEF’s Tap Project will donate enough money to ensure one day of a child’s drinking water needs are met.

With Silicon Valley churning out plenty of “cool” but useless apps, this innovative take on short-circuiting the very impulse to bury oneself in their phone, in the interest of making an actual impact on people’s lives, is greatly salutary.

Check it out here: Treehugger, UNICEF