As state and federal efforts to upgrade the civic infrastructure have faltered, the private and nonprofit sectors see an opportunity to provide “time-saving hacks” for recipients of food stamps and other public services, reports Wired.
“There is an endless variety of apps designed to manage life for the upper middle class, but low-income Americans — a group that spends a disproportionate amount of its budget on basic necessities — don’t benefit from the same time-saving hacks,” says Wired. “With a user base of nearly 43 million Americans, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food stamps, is ripe for innovation.”
FreshEBT, an app launched by mobile software startup Propel, allows SNAP recipients to check their balance on their phones and organize their budgets around local deals using an online shopping list. So far the app has 250,000 active users, and Propel recently got a significant injection of venture capital.
Code for America, a nonprofit that connects developers and designers with local and state governments, is developing an app for SNAP users in California — which has one of the lowest levels of enrollment of any state — that reminds them when to submit things like renewal forms, and answers questions in English and Spanish.
The apps are having an impact. “In a study with Duke University, Propel found that average SNAP recipients spent more than 80 percent of their SNAP benefits within the first nine days, completely exhausting the sum by day 21,” says Wired. “But when given an in-app tool that showed them a weekly budget instead of the entire balance, users stretched their monthly balance by two days — about six meals a month.”
The apps are also filling a need for the 10 percent of Americans who are “smartphone dependent,” according to the Pew Research Center, meaning they have no other form of internet access at home. “Americans making less than $30,000 are 13 times more likely to be smartphone-dependent than those making more than $75,000 a year,” says Wired.