Phone app donations aid free-lunch charity

Online payment technology boosted by cellphone apps has helped the Free Lunch for Children Program raise more money in the last year, the program said Tuesday.

The program has raised a total 76.78 million yuan ($12.4 million) since it started on April 2, 2011 to provide free lunches to students in rural primary schools, according to its own statistics released at a third anniversary ceremony in Guangzhou, capital city of South China's Guangdong province on Tuesday.

This year, online donations have increased with the development of social media including Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall.

Online donations made up 23.45 percent of all contributions last year. Some 65.99 percent of donations came from bank remittances.

"More and more individuals and companies are using donation apps or online platforms to donate," Deng Fei, the initiator of the program, told the Global Times. "We believe the rise of new technology will provide a platform for people to supervise the use of money."

The free lunch program has helped 91,190 students in 359 primary schools across the country since its launch.

"We've seen a sharp rise in individual donations after WeChat launched its online red envelope scheme during the Spring Festival holidays," He Shuzhen, product manager of the Tencent Foundation that began cooperating with the program last year, told the Global Times. "A lot of people donated their red envelope money to charity groups via our program."

The foundation would send e-mails, reports and photos to donors, He said, so that they can see how their money was being used.

"The rise of new Internet technology offers people a platform to supervise the use of their donated money that has helped improve people's trust in the public welfare system after the Red Cross scandal of 2011," Zhu Jiangang, executive director of the Institute of China's Public Welfare of Sun Yat-Sen University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.