What if your smartphone could help donate water to those in need? To do just that, and help raise awareness of clean water shortages in many parts of the world, UNICEF has launched the Tap project.

The Tap project is a mobile web app that lets smartphone owners use – or rather, not use – their phones to aid the cause. Loading up uniceftapproject.org on your Android, Windows Phone, or iOS devices will walk you through the process. And it’s quite simple. All you have to do is to not fiddle with your phone while the website is open. A timer counts to a minute, and for every minute of inactivity a day of clean drinking water will be donated by UNICEF’s partners.

No, your phone isn’t really helping donate clean water. There’s nothing going on in the background that makes it possible. But the fact that you’ll be staring at your phone for at least one minute is very valuable advertising space. UNICEF has taken advantage of this manufactured opportunity to present its case – basically, facts and figures about its work – to the millions who’ll open the page out of curiosity. Of course, the longer users hang in there the more information they’ll be exposed to, and the more water gets donated to those in need. Thankfully it’s not all just UNICEF brainwashing – the company’s thrown in some great statistics about how many text messages have been sent during the time you’ve been on the Tap project site, as well as other info snippets.

In reality, the money for the project comes from Giorgio Armani (yes, the fashion house) which has pledged a minimum of $500 000 (around R5.4-million) to the project. For every minute a phone is inactive, while viewing the Tap project website, $0.025 (about 27c) is donated.

It is worth noting that the animation-heavy page will drain your battery in a hurry. Since it doesn’t let the phone’s display sleep, just 10 minutes running saw a 15% hit to the battery on our test phone. Still, it’s a small price to pay when charging your phone is easier than it is for some people to get clean water.