Must Have Apps for iPhone to Help Fight Poverty

The Social good movement has revolutionized and re-energized fundraising, with mobile apps  The ability to help others is now a tap away.

Here are five iPhone apps to help in the fight against poverty.

1. Make Poverty History

The white bandwith the words “Make Poverty History” can be purchased as a background for your phone for $0.99, with 100% of the profits going to charity.

With more than 50 million iPhones sold world wide, and more than 3 billion apps downloaded, if every iPhone owner was to download this one app, it would definitely be a start towards making poverty history.

2. Give Work

Give Work is a free app designed to benefit the refugees in the developing world. This app is a little strange: It asks you to complete a task on your phone and a person in a developing region will do the same thing. Your partner will get paid for both tasks.

The organization behind the app, Samasource, works with refugees by giving them “life-changing opportunities via the Internet.” Samasource says that in doing so they “enable socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the U.S. to contribute to economic development by buying services from our workforce at fair prices.”

3. Compassion

Here is an app to tug on your heartstrings and open your check book. Compassion gives you access to information on child poverty from its blog, and connects you to the organization’s Facebook Page andTwitter feed. Compassion International is a Christian child advocacy group that began providing Korean War orphans with aid and Christian values.

With this app, you can search through profiles of children in need of aid in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean and make your selection of who you’d like to sponsor. If sponsorship is not for you, there is also the option to donate directly from your phone to the Disaster Relief Fund.

4. CauseWorld

CauseWorld is a geolocation app that allows you to check in, earning you karma points instead of badges, which you can cash-in as donations to charities.

The app has you performing “good deeds” just for walking into a stores like Trader Joe’s and Borders. Sponsors like Proctor and Gamble, Citibank and Kraft donate money for your checkins. You can choose where the money is going: Poverty in Africa, Chilean relief efforts, clean water initiatives, chimpanzee habitats, tree planting efforts, education, and cancer research are just some of the deserving causes. You can earn more karma points by scanning the barcodes of specific products, and you can download certain associated iPhone apps, both free and paid, to earn more karma.

To date, CauseWorld and its karma have been able to offset 1.4 million pounds of carbon, raise more than $100,00 for Haiti and Chile, donate more than 228,000 meals to hungry Americans, plant more than 58,000 trees in rain forests, donate more than 24,000 books to children, and provide more than 18 million liters of clean drinking water.

If you are going to check in somewhere it might as well count for something good, right?

5. Donation Connect

If you’re a busy person, it’s sometimes difficult to talk to the college-aged kid canvassing on the street for charity even if you really want to. Here is an easy solution: Donation Connect brings all your valued charities right to your phone.

Download the app and hit “Find a charity.” You’ll be directed to a list of categories where you can pick which charity you’d like to support. The amount that you choose to give will then be charged to your wireless bill or deducted from your prepaid balance. You’ll never not have time to give again.

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