Can PokémonGo Help A Child In India Today?

Can PokémonGo help a child — today?

Well, probably not today. But, what if we can?

Text: Jay Mavani

[This story first appeared on medium.com. It has been republished here with permission from the author.] 

[caption id=”attachment_59513” align=”aligncenter” width=”700”] medium.com[/caption]

Imagine waking up to the news of #PokemonGO surprising everyone by converting the total time spent on the app into an equal number of magical karma points, and distributing it across all non-profit organizations that nurture endangered Pokémon characters.

Not that hard to imagine, is it? Except if it was real. Now imagine real money being distributed across non-profit organizations around the world that nurture and look after under-privileged children.

You know, the real-life endangered characters of our so-called reality.

We’re spending hours capturing and training virtual characters, ignorant to the fact that there are thousands of children (in real life) that could also do with a bit of training, a lot of caring and a whole lot of feeding.

Everyday more than 3,500 children die in India due to preventable causes. 1.2 million children die every year before their 5th Birthday. — UNICEF India

If PokémonGO’s success can add $7.5 billion to Nintendo’s marketing value, a mere percentage of that can do wonders for children that don’t even have access to clean drinking water, let alone a toy to play with.

Apple and Google (via in-app purchases) make a lot of money too; probably even more than Nintendo. The app is already helping restaurants and bars. Clearly, everyone’s having fun and there’s a lot of money being made.

If 100’s of grown-ups can be made to run in search of virtual characters, one can only imagine if the same technique is applied to real world scenarios that truly deserve the same level of dedication + attention.

And if it means enabling real-life points and rewards, so be it.

Today it’s PokémonGO, tomorrow it’ll be something else. There’ll always be something new — but what needs to be constant is the support we can guarantee to all children, everywhere and all the time.

Over the past few months, crowdfunding has displayed numerous instances of an incomparable power generated by the unification of technology and regular people with a purpose.

People like you and me, we can make something happen right now. For the same amount of an in-app purchase, collectively — we can help under-privileged children afford in-life purchases.

So, the next time PokémonGO servers are down; let’s pause and shift our attention to real-life characters that are also waiting to be found.

Words: Jay Mavani