Action Against Hunger has launched an app, Give Your Calories, with a novel method of driving donations.

The app, developed by agency Happiness Brussels, enables the user to take a photograph of a food product or scan its barcode that allows you to discover its calorie content – after which converts the calories into monetary values, which are donated via PayPal.

The launch version of the app draws on a database of over 1,000 food and drinks products, and is backed up with a barcode and food imagery database covering 2m items. If an item isn’t included in either of those, the user can add it to an auto-suggest list, helping Give Your Calories to construct a crowdsourced food and calorie database. 

“The app is designed to provide people a very easy, fun option to fight hunger daily,” said Action Against Hunger senior external relations officer James Michaud. “But it also educates users that deadly malnutrition is a predictable, preventable, and treatable condition that needlessly afflicts millions of youngsters worldwide.”