Thursday 27 September 2012

Website: Freerice.com

To quote from the freerice.com website:

“Every night one out of seven people go to bed hungry.”


Freerice.com is an excellent website run by the UN World Food Programme where you can put your general knowledge to good use.  It’s basically an online quiz but with the added bonus that for every question you get right the website’s sponsors pledge to donate funds to buy ten grains of rice for needy communities around the world.  Some of the places where rice has already been donated include Haiti, Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh and as the website is non-profit and run by the UN you can be sure that your efforts will make a difference.

At first glance ten grains of rice doesn’t sound like much, but it doesn’t take very long to answer a question, so it all adds up pretty quickly.  The questions take the form of multiple choice and start off fairly easy, so if you go for a straight-forward category then it’s possible to earn five hundred grains of rice in less than five minutes.  For the website to make an even bigger difference though, it needs as many people as possible to get involved, so this is one website definitely worth spreading the word about and encouraging your friends to give it a go.

Ten grains of rice isn't much on its own...
A nice touch is that as you answer more and more questions correctly the website displays an image of the equivalent number of grains of rice raised by your efforts pictured in a bowl to the right of the question box.  This allows you to see instantly in visual terms the difference your efforts are making.

You can also find on the freerice.com homepage details of the number or grains of rice raised in total the previous day (8,153,630 on the day of writing), as well as the grand total (currently over 95 billion grains donated to date) so you can follow just how big a difference the combined efforts of people around the world are making.

...but with a combined effort, it can soon add up.
Freerice.com currently gets around 1.2 million unique visitors per month which as already mentioned translates to around eight million grains of rice raised per day.  When you consider these figures it really puts it into perspective how a lot of individuals working together can make a big difference.  However, when you consider that the internet currently has an estimated 2,279,709,629 worldwide users, it also shows you how much more potential there is for freerice.com to grow even further and how it could potentially make an even bigger difference if more people got involved.

It’s not necessary to register for the site, but if you do then it keeps track of how much rice you’ve raised with your correct answers and as freerice.com themselves point out, it’s a nice thought to think that somewhere in the world someone is eating rice that you helped provide.




In summary, with freerice.com everyone is a winner.  Advertisers get to promote their products while making a positive difference to communities in need, people that use the site get to test their general knowledge and help make a difference in the fight against hunger by sparing only a few minutes of their time, and of course most importantly of all communities in need get free rice provided for them.




It seems appropriate to round things off with another quote from the freerice website.  In freerice.com’s own words:

‘Hunger is the world's greatest solvable problem. The solution requires no scientific breakthroughs, no miracle medicine. We already know all that we need to know, to resolve the problem!’


If you want to check it out and answer a few questions to help make a difference then the address is:

Finally, freerice are also on twitter, facebook, pinterest and google plus:


And if you want to help spread the word then click one of the small icons below to share this on facebook or tweet this to your twitter followers.

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