Rice Aid

Feeding the hungry, one vocabulary quiz at a time

By Rachel Yuen

World hunger can’t be solved with just the click of a mouse, but John Breen created an online vocabulary quiz that doubles as a way to battle world hunger, one grain of rice at a time. The program, FreeRice.com, launched in October 2007 and works like a multiple-choice vocabulary quiz. For every correct word you select, FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

Originally created to help his son study for the ACTs, Breen’s program has so far donated food to more than 20,000 refugees from Myanmar sheltered in Bangladesh. Cambodians and Ugandans will be the next to benefit from the site.

All this rice doesn’t just materialize out of your hard drive. When you play the game, advertisements appear at the bottom of the screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to purchase the rice.

Malnutrition is the number-one health risk worldwide—greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined—according to the World Food Program. Although hunger is a widespread problem, FreeRice is a unique form of aid that’s accessible to any Internet user. “It’s just an amazing concept that somebody thousands of miles away can be at their computer at home, and [with] a click of the mouse, rice can end up here on the ground in Bangladesh,” says World Food Program Officer Lindy Hogan in a video about FreeRice. “It means that these people here, who are pretty much a forgotten population, can eat today.”

In an interview with People magazine, Breen says “ending hunger is doable; it’s just a matter of getting the word out.”