Yesterday, I did a 24 hour fast. Choosing not to eat for a day is a massive privilege, especially when more than 1 in 9 people in the world are hungry. World hunger is a global problem, and with the rise of COVID-19, is only getting worse.
Donating to food banks is one way of helping locally, and The Hunger Project is just one of many ways to help globally. Another, and today’s new thing, is the World Food Programme’s Freerice game.
Freerice is a trivia game, where with every correct answer, 5 grains of rice are donated. This is a result of advert generated income: for every right answer/click a small advert appears at the bottom of the page, activating a financial payment to the WFP.
There are 26 different trivia categories, covering English language, Maths, Geography, and Science, and 5 different difficulty levels. As you can see from the picture above, the adverts aren’t too intrusive, and the game has a nice clean design – I like that for every right answer, your bowl of rice fills up.
Obviously, the equivalent of 5 grains of rice isn’t a lot of money, but it’s quite easy to spend a lot of time playing Freerice, whilst learning new things along the way. You can also sign up for an account and play to get on the leaderboard. Seeing as the player at the top of the board has 15,891,175 you might be playing for a while!
Another cool feature is the groups addition. You can play with others in the same group to see how many points you can get together. So lovely readers this is a call to action – if you fancy challenging me to some trivia and donating to world hunger at the same time, come and join my group!
Since discovering Freerice, I’ve dipped in and out of it a couple of times, happy to learn and rack up my points. It’s only a small part of helping the problem, but it’s something so fun and easy, it’s hard not to feel good doing it.
New Day, New Thing 