Free Poverty is an online geography game that I just learned about from the Langwitches blog. It’s similar to the popular Free Rice vocabulary game that donates money to purchase rice for distribution by the United Nations. In Free Poverty, though, money to distribute water is supposedly distributed to Third World countries for every correct answer.

I say supposedly just because I haven’t seen any third party corroboration that monies are actually distributed. That doesn’t mean it isn’t legitimate — it just means I’d like to learn more before I give it an endorsement (though reading about it in Langwitches certainly gives it some credibility in my eyes). I wrote the same thing about Free Rice before I was able to learn through the U.N., NPR, and the BBC that it was doing what it said it was. Please write in the comments section if you have any information on FreePoverty.

The game itself is accessible to English Language Learners and is similar to the very well-done and popular Travelpod geography games. Speaking of Travelpod, anyone can make their own geography game using that model by using their Facebook, Bebo or MySpace applications. Of course, you have to be a member of one of those sites to access that ability, but then you can embed it anywhere.

I’ll hold off putting a link to Free Poverty on my website until I learn more.