Free Rice Website Feeds the Poor with Each Click

by Maggie May Barry in Activism, February 25, 2008

The concept is simple, but brilliant. A word vocabulary game entices you to expand your knowledge while at the same time helping end world poverty. For every word you get right, 20 grains of rice is donated to end world hunger.

Some new features have been added in the last couple of months. There is now a feature that lets you hear an audio clip of the word in question, in case hearing its pronunciation helps you to better guess its meaning. The site also states that there is a team of specialists adding new words all the time, from some of the most difficult, obsure in the language, to many many more useful mid-level words, so that you’ll never run out of new vocabulary to learn.

Social aid activists have criticized the site for making us feel like we’re helping to end poverty in a fun and convenient way, placating us into feeling like we’ve done our part and can now go spend our dough and continue to guiltlessly fuel the capitalist machine. They argue that the feeling of having donated rice to a hungry refugee in Bangledesh with such minimal effort, distracts us from other, possibly more effective aid strategies, such as putting pressure on our governments to send aid, reexamine trade embargos, or enforce human rights standards, volunteering with NGOs or simply learning about the issues and living our lives in a less wasteful way. There certainly is some truth to that criticism, and we must keep it in mind and always strive to fight injustice in as many ways as possible. However, most of the north American population whiles away at least several minutes browsing the internet at some point in their day, so why not make those few minutes count for something?