Click for Free Rice

Move over Scrabulous. If you're looking for an addictive online word game to polish up your vocabulary, look no further than FreeRice.com, a website set up by a US programmer with the World Food Program.

What's unique about this online game is the part it plays in relieving world hunger. For each word that you've rightly guessed the meaning of, 10 grains of rice are donated through the United Nations to feed the poor.

Creator John Breen, a US computer programmer, is no stranger to the concept of click and donating online.

"I started The Hunger Site five or six years ago so I know people like to click to give food."
Breen launched another site - poverty.org - in January to encourage governments to contribute 0.7 per cent of their national income towards international aid. But he found that not many people were visiting the site, and so decided to emulate The Hunger Site's click-to-donate system.

As it happened, his son was preparing vocabulary tests in the US and Breen was looking for ways to help him with his vocabulary skills. "I decided if I can make a fun game for him, I can do the same for a site and put that together with clicking to donate, all with the idea of directing people to poverty.com.

"It just took off in a way that I didn't dream and it just shows how good people can be," Breen says in a telephone interview.

The donations are paid for by companies, which sponsor the game by advertising at the bottom of the webpage. Since its launch on October 7, when 830 grains of rice was donated, FreeRice has raised more than one billion grains of rice towards the UN's food program, which according to the WFP feeds 50,000 people for one day.

These are impressive numbers for a simple game that tests your literacy skills. Another online site dealing with development issues is darfurisdying.com, which was set up in April 2006 by television channel mtvU together with the Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group to educate players about the conflict in Darfur, Sudan through an interactive game.

Through both these websites, pressing development issues can now involve both the ordinary person sitting in front of their computer at home or at work and the multinational corporation looking to boost their do-gooder credentials

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