Click Here to Save the World

It sounds like spam or a cheap joke.  As if you spending time clicking and surfing the web can do any good to people who are starving to death!  Wouldn’t world hunger have ended by now then?  I was really skeptical when I first started looking into these sites…I mean, who wouldn’t be?  It just sounds too good to be true. 

According to the United Nations, 25,000 people die every day from hunger related causes, most of them being children.  Together, more than 6.5 million children die every year from a lack of food and clean water.  Only 75 cents a day would feed one child — less than it costs for one cup of coffee would provide three meals a day for one child.  If you could only save one child, would it not be worth it?  Every year $30 billion is raised from ad revenue on internet sites.  A small portion of this could help put an end to world hunger.

There has been a proliferation of sites in the last few years devoted to using the money raised from online advertising to help end world hunger. Here’s a review of some of the more popular sites, how they work, where the money comes from and where the money goes to.  Does this really work?  Why can’t someone just make a program to just keep clicking the “click here” buttons?

FreeRice

This site donates rice (obviously from the name of it!).  It is formatted as a vocabulary building game.  Every correct answer earns 20 grains of rice.  In countries where rice is a dietary staple, it takes 400 grams of rice to feed one person for one day.  Since there are approximately 48 grains of rice per gram, it would take 19,200 grains to feed one person per day.  This means that you would have to get 960 vocabulary answers right to feed one person for one day.

This website is associated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.  This center “envisions a growing opportunity to use Internet technologies to improve the ways that we teach, learn, and make information accessible to citizens around the world.”  They have helped set up the website itself as well as the vocabulary tests.  They have started branching out into other subjects as well including math, geography, art, and language tests.  These tests are set up to make clicking for free rice challenging and rewarding for the users as well as the receivers of the rice.