The World Food Programme is the largest humanitarian organization that is working to fight hunger worldwide, and is supported by the United Nations WTF works to prevent hunger, support emergency hunger situations, and work to reduce hunger and undernutrition. . In 2011, WFP aimed to bring food assistance to more than 90 million people in 73 countries through a variety of programs.
WTF has developed some online games where players can engage in online game activities and earn points that help create realworld change. One of the games, FreeRice is an online trivia game where for each correct answer played, ten grains of rice are donated to WFP to feed hungry people around the world, paid for by sponsored banners on the site.
Players can choose from 45,000 questions in a variety of subjects, including flags of the world, chemistry and literature. The game can be played in six languages. There are currently over one million registered players, who together have donated nearly 100 billion grains of rice to feed almost five million people since the game started in 2007.
WTF reports that, “1 in 7 people worldwide goes to bed hungry every night. And now, with nearly 7 billion people in the world, this means that almost 1 billion people are not getting the food they need today.”
Hunger seems like a far away problem for most of us. Earlier this month, WTF had a week with contests and promotions where it promoted the six degrees of separation idea in relation to hunger– in that we are all connected to people who are hungry through 6 levels of connections.
Today I spent some time creating my FreeRice account, and tried out two areas of trivia. I first tried the art area, and was able to identify most of the paintings ( I killed it!) I switched subjects and tried identifying flags of countries around the world, where I still won a few, but I did not do quite as well. All in all, in a couple of minutes I earned 140 grains of rice.
On the site, FreeRice states that it has two goals. One is to provide education to everyone for free. Second is to help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
Want to try FreeRice? You can join on the site, or on Facebook. Like most online games, you are able to ask friends to play, participate in contests, and read updates on the blog and site. I’m going to see if I can run the game on my phone, so that I can work to help end hunger when I am waiting or in a meeting, instead of just playing
Image Source:
freerice.com
Links: