TOPICS
Health
Covid Recovery
Laws
Energy Transition
Women
Standard of living
Rivers and Lakes
Nature
Oceans
International Relations
Space

 

HEALTH

1. New malaria vaccine approved

A new, cheaper, more effective malaria vaccine was approved for widespread use by the WHO… Read more »

2. Cervical cancer drug advance

Biggest breakthrough in treatment of cervical cancer for 20 years, with trials showing it cut risk of death by 35%…. Read more »

3. First whole eye transplant

Surgeons successfully performed the first every whole eye transplant in a human…. Read more »

4. A disease was eliminited in Bangladesh

Bangladesh became the first country in the world to eliminate the tropical disease “”kala-azar”” (the medical name is Visceral Leishmaniasis). The WHO called it “”a monumental achievement””…. Read more »

5. Child mortality rate (probably) lowest ever

The rate children died before age 5 was estimated to have dropped from 3.6% in 2021 down to 3.5% in 2022, which is the lowest global number ever estimated…. Read more »

6. India experienced a huge decline in malaria cases

India had an 85% decline in malaria cases and an 83% decline in deaths during the years between 2015 and 2022…. Read more »

7. Cancer death rates down in rich countries

US cancer death rate falls 33% since 1991, partly due to advances in treatment, early detection and less smoking, report says. The same improvements are seen in most high income countries, whith the same resources to provide the best cancer care and prevention…. Read more »

8. Elimination of malaria close in Ghana

Ghana is moving to the “elimination phase” in its battle with malaria…. Read more »

9. Anti-HIV drugs available to millions more

Worldwide, the number of people on medication for HIV rose almost fourfold, from 7.7 million in 2010 to 29.8 million in 2022…. Read more »

10. Big drop in aids deaths

AIDS-related deaths declined by 55% among women and girls and by 47% among men and boys since 2010…. Read more »

11. Major breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease

Two new medications proved they are able to slow down cognitive decline from Alzheimer’s disease. … Read more »

12. New anti-obesity drugs are effective

New competing weight-loss drugs were release to the market from multiple pharma companies…. Read more »

13. Brain implants help paralysed man walk again

In a medical first, a paralysed man from the Netherlands walked again thanks to implants in his brain that could read his thoughts…. Read more »

14. End of Malaria in Belize

The WHO certified Belize as malaria-free, following the country’s over 70 years of continued efforts to stamp out the disease…. Read more »

15. First vaccine against RSV

RSV is a common respiratory illness that can make babies and older adults very sick and the vaccine will help prevent severe illness in those groups…. Read more »

16. Leading cause of blindness eliminated in Iraq

Iraq became the 17th country to eliminate trachoma (the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide) as a public health problem…. Read more »

17. Vaccine factory in Africa

Africa’s first mRNA vaccine factory opened in Rwanda…. Read more »

 

COVID RECOVERY

18. World Happiness Recovered

World Happiness as high as before the pandemic, World Happiness Report shows…. Read more »

19. Mecca back to pre-pandemic levels

The Hajj operated at full capacity for the first time since the pandemic…. Read more »

20. China reopened border after 3 years

China finally reopened border after 3 years of closure due to Covid…. Read more »

21. Covid no longer categorized as health emergency

The WHO declared that covid-19 was no longer a “public health emergency of international concern”…. Read more »

 

LAWS

22. First African country with shared parental leave

South Africa became the first African country to introduce shared parental leave… Read more »

23. Historic elimination of state-imposed forced labour in Uzbekistan

A second consecutive cotton-picking season in Uzbekistan when government-imposed forced labour was NOT used, after it had finally been abolished…. Read more »

24. Indigenous rights boosted in Brazil

Brazil’s Supreme Court rejected efforts to restrict native peoples’ rights to reservations on their ancestral lands…. Read more »

25. Sexual offences law updated in the Netherlands

The Netherlands amended its sexual offences law to recognize that sex without consent is rape…. Read more »

26. Indigenous community wins right to reclaim land in Ecuador

Indigenous community in Ecuador won legal fight to reclaim ancestral land after more than 80 years… Read more »

27. Suicide no longer a crime in four countries

Another step was taken towards breaking the taboo around mental health, when Ghana was one of four countries to have decriminalised suicide in the past year – Malaysia, Guyana and Pakistan are the others…. Read more »

 

ENERGY TRANSITION

28. World’s largest solar farm activated

The United Arab Emirates launched the world’s largest solar farm, which will power nearly 200,000 homes and eliminate over 2.4 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually…Read more »

29. Fighting against eco fraud in the Netherlands

The Netherlands’ parliament agreed to halt subsidies to ‘untruthful’ biomass firms who can’t back up their environmental claims…. Read more »

30. Peak oil prediction

IEA forecasted demand for oil for transport being in major decline after 2026, due to shift to cleaner technologies… Read more »

31. Clean energy investment more than fossil fuel investment

For every 1 dollar invested in fossil fuels in 2023, 1.8 dollars was invested in clean energy. Five years ago for every dollar invested in fossil fuels, the same amount was invested in clean energy…. Read more »

32. EV battery prices falling

Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected, according to new research…. Read more »

33. Most new electricity was renewable

In 2022, 85% of all new electrcity production capacity was from renewable sources… Read more »

34. Record increase in new solar and wind power capacity

In 2022, the world made the largest ever increase in wind and solar new build capacity in one year…. Read more »

35. First green cement that can be used for buildings

The first time a carbon-negative cement got approval that is good enough to build with…. Read more »

36. First green container ship

Denmark launched the world’s ‘first green container ship’…. Read more »

37. Electric car battery recycling breakthrough

Promising’ new breakthrough for recycling EV batteries discovered by Swedish scientists…. Read more »

38. Young Europeans more likely to change lifestyles to save planet

Across Europe, according to a seven-country YouGov/Guardian survey, young people are more willing than older generations to make big lifestyle changes that would help combat the climate crisis … Read more »

39. First fossil fuel-free flight

For the first time ever, a commercial plane flew across the Atlantic Ocean without using fossil fuels…. Read more »

40. More countries sign up to end coal use

The US joined more than 50 other countries in agreeing to end the use of coal … Read more »

41. New pledge to reduce food emissions

For the first time, 134 countries signed a declaration pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from processes related to producing and consuming food…. Read more »

42. Electric vehicles a growing share of car market

Electric vehicles’ share of new car market is projected to be 18% in 2023. It was 4% in 2020. … Read more »

43. China’s carbon emissions expected to decline

China’s carbon emissions could peak this year before declining for the first time from next year after a record surge in clean energy investments, according to research…. Read more »

44. Big investment in carbon removal in the US

The US government announced it was investing $1.2 billion in direct air capture (DAC) technology…. Read more »

45. Nuclear fusion breakthroughs

Significant breakthroughs in fusion, which could one day potentially provide a limitless supply of clean energy…. Read more »

46. Lowest coal use since 1757 in the UK

A new analysis showed that in 2022 UK coal use had fallen to the lowest level for 266 years…. Read more »

47. Cheap train tickets in Germany

Germany introduced a €49 monthly travel ticket to help ease the cost of living and promote the use of public transport…. Read more »

48. US electricity mostly from renewables for first time

US Energy Administration revealed that America generated more electricity from renewable energy than coal for the first time in the previous year…. Read more »

49. Largest offshore wind farm starts producing power

World’s largest offshore wind farm, in the UK, produced power for the first time… Read more »

50. Renewable energy record set in Portugal

Portugal produced more renewable energy than its entire electricity needs for the longest period ever – 149 consecutive hours…. Read more »

51. Europe gets new train routes

New night train routes launched between European countries…. Read more »

 

WOMEN

52. Paid menstrual leave introduced in Spain

Spain became the first European country to introduce paid menstrual leave for women experiencing painful periods…. Read more »

53. Women finally allowed to vote everywhere

The last state to allow women to vote was the Vatican City, which in 2023 finally granted women the right to vote, meaning that women now finally have the legal right to vote in every single country in the world (although the Taliban has been removing the rights from women in Afghanistan that they first won in the 1960s)… Read more »

54. Game-changing new league for India’s female cricketers

Professional women’s cricket league, the Women’s Premier League (WPL), launched in India…. Read more »

55. More equality in earnings among married couples in the US

Husbands and wives are equal earners in a growing number of US marriages, according to new Pew research…. Read more »

56. Free maternity care to mothers in DRC

Pregnant women across the Democratic Republic of the Congo are now offered free healthcare in an effort to cut the country’s high rates of maternal and neonatal deaths…. Read more »

57. Fewer Brazilian women handwashing the laundry

Brazil is one of the world’s most populated countries, and more households than ever (70%) now have a washing machine – an invention that releases time for women in households almost everywhere!… Read more »

58. Female Leader in Bosnia & H.

First female leader elected as Chairwoman of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina… Read more »

59. Same pay for female sports in Wales

For the first time, Wales’ men’s and women’s senior football players will be paid the same for representing their country…. Read more »

60. More women in parliaments

Globally, 27% of politicians in national parliaments in 2023 were women. Back in 1997, it was just 12%… Read more »

61. Gender gap in science closing

New research showed a sharp increase in gender equality in science…. Read more »

 

STANDARD OF LIVING

62. More people than ever have clean drinking water

The latest WASH report showed that 2.1 billion people gained access to safely managed drinking water between 2000 and 2022…. Read more »

63. Internet more affordable

In 2023, both data-only mobile broadband and fixed broadband became more affordable in all regions and for all income groups, according to the UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union. … Read more »

64. Mobile Internet masts are almost everywhere

90% of the world’s population lives in an area that is covered by at least a 4G network (38% are covered by 5G). This doesn’t mean that the people can use the service, but at least the infrastructure is in place…. Read more »

65. More than 90% now have electricity

The latest energy progress report showed that 91% of the world’s population now has some access to electricity. Back in 2010, it was 84%…. Read more »

66. More money than ever to help refugees

In 2022, more money than ever before was raised to help refugees: 6 billion dollars. (This is still far from enough, as the UN refigee organizations, even with this budget, only had roughly 1 dollar per refugee per day across the world.)… Read more »

67. Rapid electrification in rural areas

According to the most recent figures released in 2023, between 2019 and 2021, the pace of electrification was rapid in rural areas, where the number of people with access grew by 33 million a year, significantly outpacing population growth… Read more »

68. Seven countries progressed to a higher income group

The post-pandemic recovery resulted in economic growth that moved seven countries into higher World Bank income groups. Only one (Jordan) moved backwards…. Read more »

69. Big decline in poverty in Mexico

The poverty rate in Mexico declined from 49.9% of the population in 2018 to 43.5% in 2022, according to a new report…. Read more »

70. Free sanitary pads in Taiwan’s schools

Taiwan made period products free in all schools and provided additional subsidies for low-income students to purchase supplies they need independently…. Read more »

 

RIVERS AND LAKES

71. Largest ever re-introduction of an “extinct in the wild” species

Release of 5,000 Polynesian snails was biggest ever release of an ‘extinct in the wild’ species.They had previously been driven away by an invasive species…. Read more »

72. European rivers restored

It was revealed that a record number of river barriers were removed across Europe in 2022, allowing rivers to flow freely and migratory fish to reach breeding areas…. Read more »

73. Paris river to become swimmable for first time in 100 years

For the first time in a century, Paris is making the River Seine swimmable thanks to a major cleaning operation. It should be ready for next year’s Olympics…. Read more »

74. Largest freshwater restoration and protection group adds new countries

38 new countries joined the world’s largest freshwater restoration and protection initiative…. Read more »

75. Historic deal to protect vital water source in US

Seven states in the American west reached an agreement to protect the sustainability of the Colorado river…. Read more »

76. Water vole reintroduction working in UK

A mammal (the water vole) facing extinction is thriving two years after being reintroduced to a Hertfordshire river in the UK…. Read more »

 

NATURE

77. EU bans goods linked to deforestation

The European Parliament approved a landmark deforestation law to ban imports into the EU of coffee, beef, soy and other commodities if they are linked to the destruction of the world’s forests…. Read more »

78. White rhino return to Congo national park

White rhinos re-introduced to the Garamba national park in Congo 17 years after the last one was killed by poachers. … Read more »

79. Tree-planting holiday in Kenya

First national holiday in Kenya for people to plant trees. 150 million free seedlings available to the public… Read more »

80. Wild tiger numbers increased in India and Bhutan

Wild tiger populations increased in India and Bhutan… Read more »

81. Slower deforestation in Brazilian Amazon

Big declines in deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in 2023…. Read more »

82. Cigarette waste crackdown in Spain

Tobacco companies to be charged to clean up cigarette butts off the streets and beaches of Spain, according to new environmental regulations…. Read more »

83. Plastic waste exports banned by EU

EU agreed to ban exports of plastic waste to poor countries…. Read more »

84. Lands preserved near Grand Canyon in US

US President Biden signed a national monument designation for the greater Grand Canyon, turning the decades-long visions of Native American tribes and environmentalists into reality…. Read more »

85. Antelope conservation triumph in Kazakhstan

The Saiga antelope changed status on the IUCN Red List after populations in Kazakhstan went from 39,000 in 2005 to a population of nearly 2 million today, thanks to conservation efforts…. Read more »

86. Scientists find plastic-eating microbes

Microbes that can digest plastics at low temperatures discovered by scientists in the Alps and the Arctic, which could be a valuable tool in recycling…. Read more »

87. Golden eagles reach record numbers in Scotland

A conservation project to move golden eagles to southern Scotland has helped the population reach the highest number for centuries…. Read more »

88. Oryx back from extinction

The Scimitar-horned Oryx had been classified as “”extinct in the wild”” since 2000, but after they were reintroduced and the focus of conservation efforts in Chad, there are now 600 of them roaming in the wild and their status changed to “”endangered.””… Read more »

 

OCEANS

89. Big step forward in protection of ocean

Countries signed the High Seas Treaty which aims to protect more of the ocean than ever before…. Read more »

90. Protecting the Great Barrier Reef

Australia rejected a coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef due to risk of ‘irreversible damage’… Read more »

91. Protection for endangered marine species in Australia

A new law to phase out commercial gillnet fishing in the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area by mid-2027 to create new net-free zones to better protect endangered marine species…. Read more »

92. Marine park to triple in size in Australia

Australia signed off on plans to almost triple the size of a marine park off Macquarie Island…. Read more »

93. Oil salvaged from abandoned ‘time bomb’ tanker in Red Sea

A tanker adrift in the Red Sea since 2015 was drained of one million barrels of oil, averting the threat of a disastrous spill…. Read more »

 

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

94. Saudi Arabia and Iran restore diplomatic ties

Saudi Arabia and Iran exchanged ambassadors, ending a seven-year break in diplomatic relations…. Read more »

95. Hundredth World Heritage site in Africa

Five new sites added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list, with Africa meeting the milestone of 100 sites…. Read more »

96. Azerbaijan and Armenia agree to goodwill steps

“”Major breakthrough”” in Armenian and Azerbaijani relations with prisoner swap…. Read more »

97. The laws against ozone depleting gases worked

The ozone layer will be completely healed within two decades, a new assessment revealed…. Read more »

 

SPACE

98. First Arab woman in space

Saudi Arabian Rayyanah Barnawi made history as the first Arab woman in space…. Read more »

99. India lands spacecraft on moon

India became the fourth country to carry out a landing on the Moon…. Read more »

100. A first for NASA – asteroid samples

After a seven-year mission, NASA scientists got their hands on sampls from an asteroid 97 million kilometers away. They hope it will give them answers about how the Earth and the Solar System were formed…. Read more »

PRESS RELEASE 30 NOVEMBER 2020

 

Today, Gapminder launches a new free educational service called the Worldview Upgrader, which will help people and organizations realize their ignorance and rid themselves of common misconceptions. 

 

For many years, Gapminder has tested the public knowledge and identified systematic misconceptions about global trends and proportions and invented different tools to fight these misconceptions. Today, we are releasing this groundbreaking new online service in which users can test themselves and replace misconceptions with updated facts.

 

The format is simple: ABC questions about global trends and proportions. All questions have been carefully selected based on the strict criteria that most people answer them wrongly. As we disclosed in our latest study (the Sustainable Development Misconceptions Study 2020), these fact questions capture widespread misconceptions about global trends and proportions that most people suffer from. The sum of which adds up to a completely wrong worldview. With this new service, users can test their preconceived ideas about important global trends that almost everyone is wrong about. If they learn the facts and answer the questions correctly, they can get a certificate that proves they have upgraded their worldview. The initial test contains global questions across all the subjects of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Gapminder’s goal is to make it easier for people to quickly rid themselves of misconceptions. As the world keeps changing, the facts change, and the questions will be updated and new ones will be added. The Worldview Upgrader will provide a simple way to upgrade people’s worldview.

 

Ola Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder, said:

“Together with my father Hans Rosling, I gave a TED-talk in 2014 (“How not to be ignorant about the world”) where I described my vision to capture and dismantle systematic misconceptions. After years of hard work, today it becomes reality and I am super excited about this!

 

“Many people rely on the media to understand the world, but it mostly focuses on exceptional and temporary events and, because of that, it can’t be expected to give people a good picture of big proportions and the slow changing trends. But in a globalized world, everyone needs a worldview that is based on data, and it needs to keep upgrading as the world changes. The staff in companies, schools and other organizations are currently wrong about the state of the world, often because they have facts that were true more than forty years ago. The Worldview Upgrader helps people and organizations quickly rid themselves of the most common misconceptions. Fortunately, the misconceptions are systematic, so we realized we could build a systematic solution to the problem. I’m convinced this will lead to better decisions for positive change, and I know my father would have loved it.” 

 

In the first version launched today, there’s one global test with one question for each of the UN Goals. Over the next couple of months we will roll out hundreds of new test questions about all aspects of global development that most people are wrong about.

 

The service is free to use. All you need is an internet connection. We hope that journalists, teachers and students, politicians, business leaders and staff, will test themselves and realize what they are wrong about. 

 

In the coming months, we will also announce our plans to help educate organizations to use the service and get certificates that prove their staff have an upgraded worldview. 

 

About Gapminder

Gapminder was founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling in 2005. It is an independent educational non-profit specialized in global misconceptions. It aims to fight common misconceptions with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. 

www.gapminder.org

 

About the Worldview Upgrader

The Worldview Upgrader is a service that helps people and organizations quickly rid themselves of the most common misconceptions and replace them with updated facts. You can test yourself or your team and get certified at upgrader.gapminder.org

 

 

If you would like to schedule an interview with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling or have inquiries regarding the new service, please contact: 

 

Klara Elzvik, Media Relations Coordinator

[email protected]

+46 70 229 9983

PRESS RELEASE 23 NOVEMBER 2020

 

Now Gapminder has a brand new knowledge test about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), where people score 82% wrong! 

“Time and time again, our tests show widespread and systematic misconceptions about the world around us. We are now testing the knowledge of the UN global goals, as it is crucial that we have accurate information if we are to succeed in solving our biggest challenges – otherwise we risk focusing on the wrong things,” said Anna Rosling Rönnlund, co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation 

Gapminder has been testing the public’s knowledge of global trends and proportions for many years, as reported by CNN, BBC and Factfulness. Now we have a brand new test with 18 fact questions relating to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Today we disclose the terribly bad results in a study called the Sustainable Development Misconceptions Study 2020. We tested the public in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden using Novus online panels. On average, 82% of answers were wrong!

Out of a possible 18, the average number of correct answers in each country was:

• Sweden: 3.4
• Denmark: 3.2
• Norway: 3.2
• Finland: 3.1

 

All four countries were almost equally wrong in the same way. The study reveals 18 systematic misconceptions about the world which needs to be corrected if people are to have a meaningful say in how we build a sustainable future. 

 

Misconceptions we found include:

• Many wrongly believe that fossil fuels no longer provide most of the world’s energy.
• In people’s heads there are 10 times more refugees than in reality.
• Most have the impression that suicides are becoming more common in the world.
• Many wrongly think that more than a third of all plastic waste ends up in oceans.

The study was done in collaboration with AFRY, as part of a long-term relationship to promote a fact-based worldview. Experts at AFRY and at universities across the world provided help with fact-checking and advice about the data for all questions.

AFRY’s CEO Jonas Gustavsson explained the company’s motivation in working together with Gapminder  “If we are to succeed in accelerating the sustainable transformation of society, wide-ranging cooperation is needed to raise knowledge levels. That’s why we are highlighting the importance of a fact-based worldview based on science. We believe that when you know better, you do better.”

The full report with more details about the questions and the results is here.

 

About Gapminder

Gapminder is an independent non-profit foundation founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling. It aims to fight common misconceptions with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. Gapminder supports the UN’s global goals for sustainable development by working for increased knowledge about sustainable development at local and global levels.

 

About AFRY

AFRY is an international engineering, design and advisory company, supporting its clients to progress in sustainability and digitalisation. It is made up of 17,000 devoted experts within the fields of infrastructure, industry and energy, operating across the world to create sustainable solutions for future generations.

 

About the Global Goals for Sustainable Development

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals represent the most ambitious agenda for sustainable development adopted by member states. The aim is to eliminate extreme poverty, reduce inequality and injustice in the world, promote peace and justice and resolve the climate crisis by 2030.

 

About the study

The Gapminder Sustainable Development Misconceptions Study consists of 18 questions, all of which are connected to the UN global goals. A survey was carried out by Novus on behalf of Gapminder and AFRY between the 20th and the 27th October 2020. A total of 1,036 random and representative interviews were conducted with members of the public (18–79 years of age) in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. In the UK, the survey was conducted by Google Surveys, with 150 respondents in February 2020.

 

Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling are available for interviews. If you would like to schedule an interview or have any further questions regarding the study, please contact: 

 

Klara Elzvik, Project Coordinator

[email protected]

+46 70 229 9983

 

We are soon launching a new free service to fight common misconceptions about all the UN goals with hundreds of new fact questions most people are wrong about. Sign up here to help us test it before it launches, or stay tuned for updates on twitter, facebook, linkedIn or instagram.

Here’s a sneak peak of our new service, coming soon…

This is the fourth Corona video in a series listed here.

Every day we hear about more Corona deaths, and it always feels like bad news. But if you follow the weekly change, even the peak of the week might be a drastic decline compared to what we expected.

You can download the free video, slides and data, and use them under Creative Common Licence BY 4.0 in any way you like (!) as long as you mention “based on free stuff from Gapminder.org”. Thank you!

— DATA SOURCES These trends shows data that has been slightly cleaned up by Gapminder, based on the daily data from ECDC, downloaded on June 10 2020 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/download-todays-data-geographic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide Gapminder has calculated the 7-day sums and multipliers. On some dates in some countries, there are sudden large increases of reported deaths, which stand out from the regular weekly cycles. This happens when the health-care system brings a pile of records from other parts of their administration, such as deaths outside hospitals or at care-homes for the elderly. We have re-allocated these higher numbers to earlier dates to avoid a false impression of sudden increase of deaths. There are probably many more such artificial impressions of sudden increases left in the data but we can’t remove those because we don’t have access to primary records of patients, but please contact us at [email protected] if you can help improve the data.

This video was produced by Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

LICENSE : This video, slideshow and data are all free to use, edit and redistribute and even sell, under Creative Common License CC BY 4.0, just remember to mention “based on free stuff from gapminder.org”.

This is the third Corona video in a series listed here.

In this film we present our estimate of a common duration, which is several days shorter than the average duration of 26 days. Our purpose is to have a useful rule of thumb for what delay to expect between a behavioural change and a change in weekly death statistics. We can’t use the longer averages for this, because they are influenced by a minority of cases that have much longer durations than normal, before symptoms, before death or before reporting. Such long durations are quite common, and they have great variation, but they won’t be the first to indicate the effect of a behavioural change.

You can download the free video and slides and use them under Creative Common Licence BY 4.0 in any way you like (!) as long as you mention “based on free stuff from Gapminder.org”. Thank you!

— DATA SOURCES Numbers are based on (but not identical to) the mean durations from CDC — COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios, Table 2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#table-2  

This video was produced by Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

LICENSE : This video, slideshow and data are all free to use, edit and redistribute and even sell, under Creative Common License CC BY 4.0, just remember to mention “based on free stuff from gapminder.org”.

This is the second Corona video in a series listed here.

In this video Ola Rosling explains how the weekly multiplier of deaths let us keep track of the pandemic and compare it across countries and over time. The virus is capable of multiplying itself amongst us, and kill us. We change our behaviour to stop it from doing that. To see if we are succeeding we can take the number of deaths this week and divide it with the number for the previous week. If the multiplier is above one: the virus is still winning. If the number is below one: we are winning.

You can download the free video, slides and data, and use them under Creative Common Licence BY 4.0 in any way you like (!) as long as you mention “based on free stuff from Gapminder.org”. Thank you!

— DATA SOURCES These trends shows data that has been slightly cleaned up by Gapminder, based on the daily data from ECDC, downloaded on June 3 2020 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/download-todays-data-geographic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide Gapminder has calculated the 7-day sums and multipliers. On some dates in some countries, there are sudden large increases of reported deaths, which stand out from the regular weekly cycles. This happens when the health-care system brings a pile of records from other parts of their administration, such as deaths outside hospitals or at care-homes for the elderly. This happened in Finland on April 22 and 24, and in Norway between May 4 to 15. We have re-allocated these higher numbers to earlier dates to avoid a false impression of sudden increase of deaths. There are probably many more such artificial impressions of sudden increases left in the data but we can’t remove those because we don’t have access to primary records of patients, but please contact us at [email protected] if you can help improve the data. The way we re-allocated the piles in Finland and Norway is documented in the data file that can be downloaded here.

This video was produced by Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

LICENSE : This video, slideshow and data are all free to use, edit and redistribute and even sell, under Creative Common License CC BY 4.0, just remember to mention “based on free stuff from gapminder.org”.

Almost everyone answered this wrongly: “Globally, how many are 65 and older? A.10%, B.30%, C.50%”. We tested 20 thousand people in 32 countries with Ipsos-MORI in 2019: The results were terrible! But we were happy yesterday to see that our Facebook followers scored much better: 66% of you were correct. Please help share this with your friends who are most likely just as wrong as everyone else about the main Corona risk group.

— In this video Anna (co-founder of Gapminder) presents results from surveys in 32 countries and shows what the actual age structure of the world population looks like.
— Gapminder is soon launching a new service for ignorance reduction. Sign up to become an early tester here: http://www.gapm.io/tester
— The source behind the correct answer is UN’s 2019 revision of the World Population Prospects https://population.un.org/wpp/
— The slideshow in this video is free to use under Creative Common License, and can be downloaded here: https://bit.ly/65_slides
– Check out Gapminder´s interactive tools to see how the size of the old population in all countries changes over time in our bubble chart: https://gapm.io/v65plus , and in animating age pyramids https://bit.ly/agepyramids

 
We asked this question to people in the UK and to our followers: — How much of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from airplanes?
In this video Ola Rosling (co-founder of Gapminder) shows that many are probably wrong about this, which can lead to great disappointment for people who are imagining that the Corona pause will significantly slow down global warming. This was strongly inspired by CarbonBrief’s analysis of the ongoing corona emission reduction. Read it here.
— Gapminder is soon launching a new service for ignorance reduction. Sign up to become an early tester here.
— The source behind the correct answer is this article: “Measuring greenhouse gas emissions from international air travel…”, 2018 by Jörgen Larsson, Anneli Kamb, Jonas Nässén and Jonas Åkerman
— The assumptions about CO2 emissions per person on different income levels can be seen as country averages in this bubble chart.
— The slides used in this video are free to use under Creative Common License.

The non-stop flow of information about the new coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by a similar surge in misinformation. While the coronavirus has brought travel and economic activity to a near standstill in large parts of the world, conspiracy theories and misinformation continue to travel and proliferate at high velocity. How common are misconceptions about COVID-19 (the disease caused by the new coronavirus)? And do they matter to efforts to combat the pandemic?

We conducted surveys of 2,608 respondents between March 14-19 2020 across a range of COVID-19 affected countries: the UK, the USA, Italy, Brazil and Japan using the online tool Google Surveys (more info on methods here). We asked respondents 10 questions about the coronavirus, including how the pathogen initially spread to humans, how deadly the coronavirus is compared to the seasonal flu, and what people can do to reduce the risk of infection. The results suggest that belief in misinformation is widespread globally, with some local variation, and that people who have adopted more misinformation are less likely to take actions to keep themselves and others safe.

As people across the globe are dealing with the sudden reality of life under quarantine, many are seeking answers about the origin of the pandemic. Why did the coronavirus begin to spread among humans? We found that as many as 39% of the 2,608 respondents believed that an (accidental) release of the virus from Chinese labs caused the virus to spread to humans – from 27% in the UK to 45% in Japan. Interestingly, people who believed the rumour were also 60% (95% CI 1.2-2.2) more likely to report that they’re doing nothing to prevent infection with the coronavirus, and less likely to wash their hands more often (Odds Ratio (OR) 0.8 95% CI 0.7-0.9).

While China was struggling to contain the epidemic, some politicians and commentators elsewhere attempted to downplay the public health significance of the novel coronavirus, arguing that the seasonal flu causes more deaths than the coronavirus. At this point in time it is still too early to determine how deadly COVID-19 really is, but so far, data consistently point to the disease being substantially deadlier than the seasonal flu. However, in our sample, 22% of the respondents believed that the seasonal flu was deadlier than the novel coronavirus. This view was most common in the USA (34%) and least common in Italy (14%). Importantly, people who thought that the seasonal flu is deadlier than COVID-19 were also 30% less likely to practice social distancing (OR 0.7 95% CI 0.5-0.8). When asked how many more people they thought would get infected with the coronavirus, the flu-believers thought that additional infections would number in the thousands – a highly optimistic assessment that has already been proven wrong.

There are some common factors uniting believers in seemingly disparate conspiracy theories. Those who believe that Chinese labs caused the pandemic and that the seasonal flu is deadlier are 30% more likely to distrust the news media compared to those who did not believe these misconceptions. And as described above, both beliefs were associated with reduced individual actions that could help curb the pandemic. (Our data is based on cross-sectional surveys, so the associations we see can also be interpreted in the opposite directions, for instance that those not acting to prevent infection are more likely to believe that the virus spread from a Chinese lab.)

On average, 9% of the 2,608 respondents indicated that they did not do anything to prevent infection with the coronavirus. Men were 60% (95% CI 1.2-2.1) more likely than women to say so. Only 3% of the Italian respondents reported taking no actions to reduce infection risk, which is not surprising given that Italy was on nation-wide lockdown during the survey. This presents a stark difference from Brazil, where 17% of respondents said they did not take active measures to prevent infection.

A pandemic presents a strange and discomfiting societal challenge; across large parts of the world, the best action one can take is to follow public health directives such as social distancing. Misconceptions that undermine public health guidance pose real risks, and should be actively targeted. Preventing the spread of rumours can contribute to slowing the spread of the virus. While media companies and social media platforms have a responsibility to help, individual action matters as well. Online social distancing comes down to thinking critically and questioning our assumptions and beliefs before sharing. Digital distancing can also save lives.

Figure 1 Prevalence of misconceptions by country

Table 1 Associations between misconceptions and practices & distrust in news media

	Coronavirus accidentally released by Chinese labs	The seasonal flu is deadlier than coronavirus
	Adjusted* Odds Ratio (95% CI)	Adjusted* Odds Ratio (95% CI)
I don’t do anything	1.60 (1.17-2.20)	1.35 (0.92-1.98)
I avoid close contact with others	0.91 (0.76-1.08)	0.67 (0.55-0.83)
I wash my hands more often	0.79 (0.66-0.94)	0.83 (0.65-1.06)
I distrust news media	1.36 (1.10-1.70)	1.28 (1.04-1.58)

*Adjusted for gender, age and survey weights
CI = Confidence Interval

This study was carried out by the Gapminder Foundation in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet and New York University:

Maike Winters, Ben Oppenheim, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling, Helena Nordenstedt

For more information: [email protected]

Do you love facts? So does Gapminder, and we are looking for more people like us.

During the past 10 years Gapminder has become world-famous for dismantling global misconceptions and promoting a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. We systematically ask people fact-questions about the world, wanting to reveal and dismantle the largest misconceptions about basic global facts in all kinds of topics, from demography to climate change and the global financing system, and many more.

Today, our free teaching tools reach more than 5 million people across the world each year. We want to reach more people and dismantle even more misconceptions to have a global impact on people’s worldview. With large upcoming projects to do just that, we are now looking for more Ignorance Hunters, people with different backgrounds and expertise, but with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and facts.

About the Ignorance hunting role

In this role you will be digging deep to find facts, which you enjoy. You don’t give up until you find and understand them.

Your responsibility will be to find important and relevant facts, making sure they are correct, and phrase them in simple language and questions.

You have a natural instinct for what the general public might know and what they probably have no idea about. You will find the data behind the published and publicized facts and can look for underlying patterns and correlations with related topics.

Responsibility

You will be working in a team with Ignorance hunters, to independently identify the most relevant facts that can be translated into questions, that will be tested on the public.

Basic qualities and requirements

• You have a basic knowledge of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and global development.
• Experience from working with research is an asset.
• You have very good numerical, analytical and fact-checking skills and are able to use them to find interesting facts.
• You have a good understanding of how people think.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills in English. Other languages are an asset.
• You are able to clearly communicate and collaborate with team members and external consultants.
• Ability to work independently and to take initiatives.

Location

Anywhere, online (there is office space in Stockholm, Sweden if you live close by)

Terms, to be discussed

• Temporary contract or consultancy contract, with start immediately for a 3-6 months project (could evolve into a position at Gapminder Foundation)
• Full or part time, super-flexible working hours

How to apply

If this sounds interesting, please send in your application 2019-12-19 at the latest by following these steps:

1. Take the Gapminder Test: http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018
2. Send in a short letter of introduction (max 1 A4) (or very short video!), explaining why you think you fit this job description.
3. Send in your CV (short version) to [email protected]

The position will be filled as soon as possible, so do not wait to send in your application!

 

About Gapminder

Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Gapminder is a fact tank, not a think tank. Gapminder fights devastating misconceptions about global development. Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics. Gapminder promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. Gapminder collaborates with universities, UN, public agencies and non-governmental organizations. All Gapminder activities are governed by the board. We do not award grants. Gapminder Foundation is registered at Stockholm County Administration Board.

Do you love facts? So does Gapminder, and we are looking for more people like us.

During the past 10 years Gapminder has become world-famous for dismantling global misconceptions and promoting a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. We systematically ask people fact-questions about the world, wanting to reveal and dismantle the largest misconceptions about basic global facts in all kinds of topics, from demography to climate change and the global financing system, and many more.

Data accuracy is absolutely key to us. That’s why we triple-check every fact and number we use.

In the coming weeks and months, we need more fact checkers to help us on a big misconception project. That’s why we are looking for you!

About you and the fact-checker role

Ideally, we are looking for someone with a background in journalism. You can’t be afraid to pick up the phone to lots of experts to ask their opinion about a dataset or a data source.

We are looking for someone who is comfortable working with numbers. You don’t have to be a mathematician or statistician, but you have to be able to make simple calculations.

You have to be absolutely committed to accuracy. We need to use the most reliable and also the latest data and it is up to the fact-checker to make sure we have both. We cannot compromise our standards for accuracy.

Because most data has some limitations, we need you to think critically, weighing up the feedback you have received from experts to make a recommendation about how we use the data and, if we do, what we need to include in our public communication in order for it not to be misleading.

Responsibilities

Your responsibility will be to check, double check, and triple check facts with experts. We need to be aware of any doubts or margins of error in the data we use, even if it comes from international NGOs with stellar reputations.

Basic qualities and requirements

• You have a background in journalism or similar
• Knowledge and interest in the Sustainable Development Goals and global development is valuable
• You have good numerical, analytical and fact-checking skills
• You have a detailed and critical mindset
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills in English. Other languages are an asset.
• You are able to clearly communicate and collaborate with team members and external consultants.
• Ability to work independently and to take initiatives

Location

Anywhere, online (there is office space in Stockholm, Sweden if you live close by)

Terms, to be discussed

• Temporary contract, with start immediately for a 3-6 months project (could evolve into a position at Gapminder Foundation)
• Full or part time, super-flexible working hours

How to apply

If this sounds interesting, please send in your application 2019-12-19 at the latest by following these steps:

1. Take the Gapminder Test: http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018
2. Send in a short letter of introduction (max 1 A4) (or very short video!), explaining why you think you fit this job description.
3. Send in your CV (short version) to [email protected]

The position will be filled as soon as possible, so do not wait to send in your application!

 

About Gapminder

Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Gapminder is a fact tank, not a think tank. Gapminder fights devastating misconceptions about global development. Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics. Gapminder promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. Gapminder collaborates with universities, UN, public agencies and non-governmental organizations. All Gapminder activities are governed by the board. We do not award grants. Gapminder Foundation is registered at Stockholm County Administration Board.

Most people misunderstand how everyday life is for the majority of people in Africa. Even for those in Africa, it can be hard to understand how the billion other people live without travelling to see some of them.

To try to counter the many misconceptions and out-of-date views there are about how people live, Gapminder invented Dollar Street, a free website in which photographers have documented life on different income levels across the world. It started with people’s homes, and will now be extended to include healthcare and education.

Thanks to funding from Code for Africa’s innovateAFRICA programme, Gapminder was able to send photographers out to schools and health clinics in Tanzania.

Itope Clinic, Tanzania

It is an important first step in showing even more pictures of everyday life for people in countries that most people never have the chance to visit, yet often have an opinion of based on what they have seen on TV and read in the news.

Because life on Dollar Street is ordered by income rather than by country, we are currently developing a method to calculate the income or expenditure of schools and health clinics, so we can compare how they look on different levels.

Classroom, Tanzania

In addition, Code for Africa’s funding will also simplify the selection and sharing of photos from Dollar Street for use on social media, websites and by teachers in the classroom, making it even easier to show that income – and not nationality or culture – is the most important factor when it comes to the way people live.

Today we are happy to announce that Gapminder is partnering with Expo 2020 Dubai to “flip your worldview”. We are conducting public knowledge surveys across the world to identify common global misconceptions and we are developing data-driven explanations to replace those misconceptions with fact-based understanding. We hope that this collaboration will let millions of expo-visitors quickly flip their worldviews. An exciting experience that will equip them with an accurate picture of the current state of the world and ongoing global trends, which will let them make better decisions and create positive change for the future.

EXPO 2020 Dubai’s press release says:

Expo 2020 Dubai has announced a collaboration with the Swedish-based Gapminder Foundation to turn Expo 2020 visitors into global champions for change. The news comes as Expo 2020 marks the one-year countdown to The World’s Greatest Show of human brilliance and achievement.

Anna and Ola Rosling will work with Expo 2020 Dubai to create a series of questions to challenge visitors’ understanding of the world. This follows the results of Expo 2020’s Global Optimism Outlook Survey, which highlighted people’s desire for increased communication, knowledge-sharing and cross-border collaboration.

“The world is far more optimistic than is often felt,” said Ola Rosling, Chairman, and Co-Founder, Gapminder Foundation. “The Gapminder Foundation was born to allow people to be able to learn more about the world for themselves in a clear, unbiased manner. We see challenges in the world every day but this, in turn, creates opportunities. The magic happens when the world comes together to inspire change on a global scale, and that’s exactly the intent of Expo 2020 Dubai. Therefore, we’re truly excited to be part of this project, to help people  make better informed choices that lead to positive change for the future.”

The project will be developed between now and October 2020, when Expo officially opens, in collaboration with participating nations. A series of questions will then be placed across the Expo 2020 site, where data will be gathered and transformed into a factual analysis of our understanding and perception of the world around us.

Manal Al Bayat, Chief Community Engagement Officer, Expo 2020 Dubai said: “We are now just one year away from The World’s Greatest Show of human brilliance – one year away from bringing millions of people together with 192 participating nations, in the spirit of optimism, to understand the world around us, and to create and inspire people to build a better future.

“Our collaboration is part of Expo 2020 Dubai’s aim to drive positive and lasting change where it is most needed. That change cannot begin without us knowing more about the world around us, and with those we share it. We are thrilled to have Anna and Ola Rosling with us for such an important milestone, and we look forward to further developing the project ahead of opening next year.”

The Gapminder Foundation offers cost-free teaching material that allows people to develop a fact-based view on global society. The project aims to understand our knowledge of one another today. This reflects Expo’s optimistic purpose to connect millions from around the world to be inspired to create a better future. Working with Novus and IpsosMori, the Foundation polled 20,000 people in 31 countries.

They found that when people were asked a series of eighteen questions about global trends such as average income levels, the number of people aged over 65, or how the global population is distributed across continents, the average respondent got just 2.9 questions right.

By contrast, someone selecting one of three possible responses at random would be expected to score 6 out of 18. This difference demonstrates the extent to which people’s knowledge of wider world can be incorrect.

Expo 2020 Dubai opens its doors to the public on 20 October 2020. For more information, visit www.expo2020dubai.ae

During the past 10 years Gapminder has become world famous for dismantling global misconceptions and explaining a fact-based worldview. Our free teaching tools reach more than 5 million people across the world each year and our plan is to reach many more.

Job Description

During the past 10 years Gapminder has become world famous for dismantling global misconceptions and explaining a fact-based worldview. Our free teaching tools reach more than 5 million people across the world each year. We think that number should be much higher. Therefore we are now planning to build more tools and better services to fight global misconceptions, and that’s why we need you: an experienced product manager who knows how to deliver digital products and other services to different target audiences across the world.

As a product manager, you will start on an experimental project to visualize medicine supply chains in middle and low income countries. You can read more about the project below. Because this would only take up half of your time,  we would like you to spend the rest of the time on our other activities, such as the Corporate Education initiative and the Global Misconceptions Study, among others. You will also be managing or contributing to our other projects.

We need someone who has managed agile software development before, and who has experience working with usability designers. You can set up training programs, guide content producers, negotiate with publishing partners, plan marketing campaigns and launches to maximize the attention from the target audience. And you are good at measuring results with metrics that let you improve the process and find better strategies. You enjoy constantly planning and re-planning, predicting and solving upcoming problems to reach deadlines, and you love facilitating team collaboration to make sure things get delivered on time.

With you on board, Gapminder will invent and deliver new services that should reach hundreds of millions of curious people around the world and help them get a fact-based worldview.

Experimental project, visualising medicine supply chain maturity

The goal is to make potential improvements to a medicine supply chain easy to understand with the aid of photos and videos. So the project seeks to create a Minimum Viable Product (a simple online semi-interactive platform or a mock, for example) based on the Dollar Street framework (more info below) that shows warehouses and their services in different maturity levels. The project started last November and in this role you will be responsible for finishing the project before March 2020.

We’re based in Stockholm, but it is not essential for the  project manager to be there. It is important, however, to be available to travel to Stockholm to meet with our team members on a regular basis.

Basic information about the project

Provisory title: Dollar Street for Supply Chain

Summary: Make visual documentation (photos+videos+questionnaire) of warehouses in different countries to try to illustrate different levels of maturity for the national health supply chain of those countries. Maybe we’ll be able to document a factory,  point of entry, and district clinics as well. Initially, the focus is on the warehouses at the end of the supply chain.

Main tasks:

• Book the visits to the warehouses/clinics/factories in the specific countries that will be part of this project.
• Coordinate the documentation/visit logistics with photographers, consultants and representatives of warehouses/clinics/factories.
• Travel to these countries to oversee the visits.
• Coordinate with Gapminder’s team for them to tag the photos and videos in our experimental online platform.
• Coordinate with video editors, graphic designers and programmers who will create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with the material collected and lessons learned from the project.
• Update Ola Rosling and Gapminder team on a regular basis about the status of the project.
• Update the funders regularly on the status of the project.
• Organise and categorise the material collected and help to analyse it in accordance with the supply chain maturity model.
• Keep track of expenses and activities performed and coordinate with our Head of Finance and Administration on the financial status of the project. Plan for forthcoming activities.
• Write the final report for the project for the funders and help our finance and admin manager to produce the financial report.

Requirements:

• At least two years experience in project/product management
• Ability to work independently and to take initiative
• Excellent communication and leadership skills
• Required to travel abroad to accompany the documentation of warehouses and other locations
• Excellent written and spoken English. Swedish not required
• Experience of working with a team of software developers is desirable
• Answer all questions from the Gapminder Test correctly, proving that you know the basic global facts

Terms, to be discussed:

• Temporary contract, from September 2019 to end of March 2020
• Full-time, super flexible working hours

How to apply

Send an email to: [email protected], with the following attachments:

• The pdf-diploma you received when you passed the Gapminder Test: gapm.io/test18
• Your CV
• A short letter of introduction (or very short video!), explaining why you think you fit this job description

To understand the Dollar Street framework, watch our co-founder’s TED talk:  See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income | Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Job Description

During the past 10 years, Gapminder has become world famous for explaining a fact-based worldview and for teaching Factfulness. We have built a huge global online audience, but most of our ideas have not yet been published: we keep inventing new stuff all the time!

We need a creative person who loves to explain complex content through different types of visuals (e.g. animated infographics). You are excellent at creating content for websites and social media platforms quickly. You will also make sure that all of our materials and outputs are in line with our style guidelines before they are published. You have some experience in making videos and short animations, either by yourself or with external contractors.

You enjoy being in a constant planning and re-planning mode, predicting and solving upcoming problems for future deadlines, and you love facilitating team collaboration to make sure things get delivered in time. If you can make this happen, Gapminder has the channels to reach hundreds of millions of curious people around the world. People who are fed up with the avalanche of overdramatic media reports in their online feeds. People who want to see a fact-based worldview on a daily basis, to reduce unnecessary stress and make better decisions.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for translating our content and the data we work with into amazing visuals:

• Creating full infographics (animated and/or static), charts, simple graphs, gifs and other visual content for interactive experiences or for publication in our digital and print channels.
• Providing the graphic component to our communication packages and reviewing other materials ahead of launches to ensure brand coherence and alignment to our style guidelines.
• Producing templates for online and print materials (e.g. press releases, HTML emails (headers and footers), document layouts, PPT presentations, posters).
• Editing and retouching images.
• Filming, editing and producing short videos for different purposes and channels.
• Collaborating with external contractors for graphic design, animations and video production projects if needed.

Basic Qualifications

• You have at least 2 years of work-life experience.
• You have good numerical and analytical skills and are able to use them to translate data into amazing visuals.
• Your have infographics in your portfolio, with data-driven graphics and easy-to-understand statistical diagrams.
• You are a star using the Adobe Creative Cloud.
• You are structured, organised and have a goal-achieving attitude.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills in English. Other languages are
  an asset.
• You are able to clearly communicate and collaborate with team members and external
  consultants.
• You are able to manage many projects at once.

Location

Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden – and you can work from home a lot!

Timing

It is a full time position (on a consultancy basis), which could evolve into a staff position at the Gapminder Foundation. The work will start as soon as possible, when we have found the right person for the job. We will send feedback to all applicants no later than 27 May 2019.

How to apply

Send an email to: [email protected], with the following attachments:

• The pdf-diploma you received when you passed the Gapminder Test: gapm.io/test18
• Your CV and portfolio.
• A short letter of introduction (or very short video!), explaining why you think you fit this job description.

Please note that the persons invited to an interview will be asked to do a test.

 

Job Description

During the past 10 years Gapminder has become world famous for explaining a fact-based worldview and for teaching Factfulness. We have built a huge global online audience, but most of our ideas haven’t been published yet, because we are missing an effective process for finalizing and delivering new content to our audience. Instead of delivering, we often keep inventing new ideas all the time.

This is why we need you: an experienced producer who has managed content production before. You have worked in a newsroom or in another media production process with frequent deliverables. You’ve got the skills to lead and coordinate content creators working with multiple media formats, including graphics, text, film and web pages. You enjoy being in a constant planning and re-planning mode, predicting and solving upcoming problems for future deadlines, and you love facilitating team collaboration to make sure things get delivered in time.

Such proactive process skills is exactly what’s needed to turn our ever-growing treasury of drafts and ideas into high quality content and make sure it’s published on a frequent basis. If you can make this happen, Gapminder has the channels to reach hundreds of millions of curious people around the world. People who are fed up with the avalanche of overdramatic media reports in their online feeds. People who want to see a fact-based worldview on a daily basis, to reduce unnecessary stress and make better decisions. People who want Gapminder to demonstrate Factfulness in practice.

Responsibilities

– You will be responsible for maximizing Gapminder’s output of high quality content.
– You will build a flexible team of content producers and coordinating their work.
– You will plan daily and weekly deadlines, and make sure they are not missed.

Job description

– Plan content: On a regular basis, you will plan the content and deadlines in close collaboration with the heads of R&D and Communication, which currently means Anna & Ola Rosling. Together with them you will populate the content delivery calendar for the next couple of months, with well defined deliverables on a weekly and daily basis. The content will consist mainly of data-driven stories about global statistics and analysis about common misconceptions about these. The output formats will be infographics, videos, articles, social media posts, posters, slideshows, web-campaigns, and whatever other media format we realize we need.
– Create a team: You will create a team of talented content producers who probably will be a mixture of full time staff members and external consultants, whom you may recruit from your professional networks or through other channels.
– Defining and delegating tasks and responsibilities: You will predict what work needs to be done and break down separate tasks to different team members and keep track of their progress to make sure they will reach the deadline.
– Facilitate the team: You will predict and solve dependencies and bottlenecks and  communicate any changed plans to directors and team members, in order to hit the deadlines.
– Plan for future deadlines: You will proactively plan for future deadlines while the team is working towards the next one. In this way we will not miss the special competences and preparation needed for creating the content that is planned for future deadlines. You will also pile up additional content to make sure we keep publishing during holidays and vacations.
– Review and iterate: Before finalizing content for a deadline, you will make sure it has passed the review of the heads of R&D and Communication, which currently means Anna & Ola.
– Finalize and deliver content: After the team has adjusted the content based on the feedback from reviews, you will make sure it gets finalized in time for the deadline. When the content is ready, it may be other people who are going to publish it. Your task is to get it ready and deliver it to the people responsible for publishing it in different channels in the near future.
– Create guidelines: You will write guidelines for future content production, such as style-guides for copy and design, based on the feedback you receive about how the content performs in various channels.
– Improve the process: In retrospective you will evaluate together with the team, what went good and what went bad, and use this to improve the process so that previous experiences leads to a team that stays happy and productive.

Basic Qualifications

– You have 7+ years of experience of media production.
– You have strong project management and organizational skills.
– You have good numerical and analytical skills.
– You have strong written and verbal communications skills.
– You are able to clearly communicate and collaborate with team members and external consultants.
– You are able to manage many projects at once.
– You have strong knowledge of professional office software.

Location

Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden

Timing

The work will start as soon as possible, when we have found the right person for the job.
We will send feedback to all applicants, no later than January 15, 2019.

How to apply

Please send an email to: [email protected], with the following attachments:
1. The pdf-diploma you received when you passed the Gapminder Test 2018: gapm.io/test18
2. Your CV
3. A short letter of introduction, explaining why you think you fit this job description.

Looking forward to hear from you!
🙂 Ola Rosling
Gapminder

Announcement: Today the team behind SVT Rapport is the first newsroom in the world to get the Gapminder Global Fact Certificate!

On September 14, 2017, we visited SVT Rapport, a newsroom of SVT, the Swedish national public TV broadcaster, which is one of the most trusted news sources in Sweden. We tested their core team of 15 people with fact questions about the state of the world. They didn’t score terribly bad, but just like most people (including journalists) they got most of our questions wrong. We lectured to them for an hour about the state of the world, and upgraded their worldview. Then we tested them with the Gapminder Test and then they scored 100% correct. And that makes them deserve the Gapmidner Team Certificate.  Gapminder can now guarantee that the newsroom SVT Rapport have essential global knowledge that most people are missing. Dear Swedes! Next time you watch Rapport, you can feel safe: You’re not listening to a reporter with an overdramatic worldview.

This is the first announcement of a Gapminder Team Certificate, which will become one of our most important strategies to fight devastating misconceptions at workplaces. In this way we can guarantee that teams of professional are up to date with the state of the world they work in. We can know for sure that people are not just enjoying an entertaining presentation, but actually learn form our lectures.

If you want your team to get a certificate, please contact us at: [email protected].

Or stay tuned about this new strategy by following us on Facebook or Twitter where we will keep posting about this project.

The U.N Secretary General signed the beautiful diploma below for Hans, with a wonderful motivation that truly captures Hans’ dedication. It was a great honor for me to visit U.N. headquarters last week to receive the prize on Hans’s behalf. I thanked the committee for choosing Hans, but I also expressed Hans’ thankfulness to all of You who supported him during the past decades. This award is also to You!

To carry Hans’ legacy forward, at the award ceremony, I did what Hans would have done. I took the chance to teach. The slides I used are downloadable here among our many other free slideshows. Please take them and use them!

To all of you who loved Hans’ excitement for enlightenment, it’s time for you to take responsibility. Please help us carry Hans’ legacy forward into the next decade. Download Gapminder’s free slides and tools, and promote a fact-based worldview to everyone you meet all the time. With your support, Gapminder could potentially win even more U.N. Prizes in the future! 😉

Thanks!

Ola Rosling, President of the Gapminder Foundation

(More photos from the ceremony are further down the page).

Motivation:

“In recognition of the power of his intellect and influence for human understanding and progress; his dedication and unwavering commitment to public health, population dynamics and the eradication of poverty for over three decades; his remarkable quest and success in promoting increased use of data and a better fact-based understanding of the world communicated with his personal wit and humour through a wide range of publications, documentaries and educational videos, and above all, the iconic infographics: Trendalyzer developed by the Gapminder foundation he co-founded to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends from international statistics; his enthusiastic investigation of a rare and previously unrecognised paralytic disease and its cause; for pioneering health research collaborations with universities; and for his sterling leadership in championing international cooperation in health.”

 

As Hans showed in the film Don’t Panic, the richest billion people emits the double amount of CO2 compared to the second richest.

The richest countries don’t like this fact, because it shows who must start cutting CO2 most urgently!

It’s us. It’s not them!

U.S. and other high income countries instead like to compare total emission, which makes the Chinese and the other large middle income countries seem more guilty.

But I think the World Bank should avoid this game. The Bank’s front page today is depicting the total emission of Upper middle income and comparing it to High income.

link

But come on! It’s unfair. They are more people. Look at the huge difference in population size:

• Upper middle income: 2.6 Billion people
• High income: 1.2 Billion people

link

No surprise that Upper middle income emits more CO2. They have more than twice the population of High income.

I think the World Bank should promote this chart instead:

link

It’s interesting to notice that CO2 per capita has been flat in High income for several decades. Some of it is because the increased consumption is covered by imports from Upper middle income. Industries have moved to China and elsewhere, where increasing amount of CO2 has is emitted while producing products that are still consumed on High income. It gives the impression that the way of life in Upper middle income trend is emitting more and more CO2. But the consumption often doesn’t happen where the CO2 is emitted.

🙂 Ola Rosling

Under “The Way Forward” we will publish posts from former students and colleagues of Hans Rosling, on how to take his work with providing a fact-based worldview forward.

We are a generation of students who grew up with Hans Rosling as our teacher, our moral compass and most of all our role model.

Hans Rosling has inspired students across the globe. For many of us, he was the major reason to our choice of study, our interest and engagement in global health, our many hours of late night studying. As students at Karolinska, we were especially privileged to have Hans as our teacher. His presence at Campus was a persistent source of inspiration. Constantly busy and on the move, our energetic and enthusiastic professor always took the time to listen to us, encourage us and try to give us answers to our questions (the most difficult as well as simple ones). He had a very rare way of making us feel important and significant as students.

Hans Rosling inspired and empowered a whole generation of young Global Health leaders. With a toilet roll he could explain the most complex issues and make our rapidly changing world comprehensible. By providing us with tools in his ever optimistic manner, he appeased us when the world went chaotic and he gave us faith when the world seemed to be getting darker.

Hans used to make a point out of the fact that students, and people in general, would get less correct answers on his quizzes than chimpanzees. The Hans Rosling Generation has changed that. Aside from the fact-based worldview, he taught us to always be updated, to think before we act and to constantly reevaluate the world around us. He also taught us to speak the truth and to always act responsibly, with compassion, kindness and understanding. Thanks to Hans, we are a generation of interconnected students and our classroom is the world.

Thank you Hans for the privilege of growing up with your worldview as our compass. We promise to honour your legacy of all that you have taught and given us.

Daniel Hellden, Caroline Olsson, Giulia Gaudenzi‎, Linus Kullänger, Magnus Winther and Emelie Looft
Students at Karolinska Institutet

Thousands and thousands of wonderful words have been written about my father during the last days. I knew he was popular. But I didn’t expect this avalanche of comforting condolences. Thanks a million everyone!

All the stories have been wonderful, but last night one article made my jaw drop. While scrolling down the page I kept thinking: Hans would have loved reading this after his death!

The article was called “This is how we let Hans Rosling rest in peace”. It was written in Swedish, by someone I’d never heard of. How could this person know my father so well? Was he a close friend of Hans, whom I had never met? How could he express with such precision what my father was thinking, and feeling?

After I woke up this morning I couldn’t resist calling the author, Peter Fällmar Andersson, who answered with a humble voice. He told me he had interviewed Hans only ones. Hans had mainly used the time to explain why he refused being categorised as an optimist. In addition to that, Peter only had access to the same free online material as everyone else.

Peter, you must be a very good listener! Many people didn’t hear what Hans was saying. And you must be a very good writer. Hans never managed to express his frustration as clearly as you do. The frustration of being fame, but not being listened to. And then you convey what Hans wanted everyone to hear!

Most people can not read our tribal language (as Hans usually called Swedish). So I asked Peter to translate the article.

Please read carefully:
“This is how we let Hans Rosling rest in peace”

Thanks Peter!
🙂 Ola Rosling

For more info, please contact Karolinska Institutet.

 

Eight hundred and one years after the birth of Jesus, another child was born, by a much richer family 170 kilometers south of Baghdad, in Kufa. He was given a much longer name: Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī. English Wikipedia just calls him “al-Kindi”.
In the beautiful world of statistics, al-Kindi’s birth marks the beginning of time. He was brilliant! He is the father of the oldest known cryptanalysis by frequency. Which means he deducted the encryption key from the frequency of letters.

All other statistical concepts came later. The earliest recorded average dates to the 1600 century. The numeric probability of Thomas Bayes is no older than 300 years. Statistics are needed to understand the world. But statistical methods are youngsters, compared to the common methods of understanding the world: guess-work & myths. Those have existed as long as there has been humans.

I consider Al-Kindí’s birth year 801 the beginning of the statistical calendar. That means we are currently living in the statistical year 1218. This explains the low level of Factfulness around us. With the “statistical calendar” we haven’t even reached the Dark Middle Ages yet!

Today is World Statistics Day, October 20. Lets celebrate it by worshiping this first frequency analysis from south of Baghdad. Lets celebrate the new way of understanding the world, which started with al-Kindi.
And every time we understand the world through data, let’s not forget all those struggling data collectors out there, knocking doors, filling out forms in order to complete a random sample or a full census. The fieldworkers who make a fact-based worldview possible. Those who enable us to understand our world, based on real frequencies instead of myths. You are always in my heart!

😉 Ola Rosling

Gapminder is celebrating world teacher’s day! UNESCO data shows that more boys and girls are completing primary and secondary school around the world than ever before. Teachers are doing a great job! But not all kids are making it into the classroom, 9% of primary school age children to be exact. Out of this group, about half (52%) are girls. The percentage of girls in the classroom has increased by 5% across low & middle income countries in last 10 years. The number has stayed more or less the same for boys. There are still some pockets of huge gender inequality, but in the world as a whole, boys and girls are going to school in roughly the same numbers. So let’s celebrate kids, their teachers and all those doing the best they can to get the remaining 9% of boys and girls into the classroom!

When we measure global knowledge, we have found that many people believe the gender gap is enormous. It’s not! Most children out of school are poor children. It’s not primarily a gender problem.

Help us beat the misconceptions. We are developing a new factfulness certificate for teachers. If you’re a teacher and would like to find out more about becoming a Gapminder certified teacher, click this link to be the first to hear when we release the programme.

 

We are delighted to announce that Gapminder Foundation has been awarded the “Crossing Borders” Leonardo Award 2016. The three founders, Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund were selected by the jury because of their “inspiring driving force that makes us all look differently at the facts of life”.

The Crossing Borders award celebrates organizations or individuals that promote learning using advanced technology and daring discourses. The award puts emphasis on outstanding new developments that challenge the predominant mind-sets with an effect on corporate learning.  

In their announcement on June 9th 2016, the jury remarked: “Gapminder founders have worked hard on the future of learning. Gapminder’s ability to highlight the people behind the numbers, visuals and animations is astonishing. These tremendous engagements are of great importance to allow more intelligent, smart and wise decisions for the benefit of people and society”.

The Leonardo Award is given annually by the HRM Research Institute in Mannheim, Germany in cooperation with the EU, the German Foreign Ministry and UNESCO. The award focuses on organizations that, in the era of globalisation, devote their zeal and lifeblood to the search for innovative solutions to the daunting challenges in the the field of learning.

Gapminder’s latest data visualisation tools can be found here: gapminder.org/tools.

What happened?

Gapminder World uses a technology called Adobe Flash Player to show all that data you love. Flash Player got updated from version 20 to version 21 on Thursday the 10th of March. That update broke Gapminder World. Because Flash Player automatically updates if there is a new version, probably without asking you, it seems Gapminder World all of a sudden stopped working. Actually it’s the new Flash Player version that broke it.

We reported the issue to Adobe and are waiting for them to fix it. In the meantime, we are investigating all options to make Gapminder World work with Flash Player 21.

How can I still use Gapminder World?

First check if Gapminder World is working for you on //www.gapminder.org/world/?use_gapminder_world. It might just work. In that case, no need to do anything.

If it doesn’t work, there are two options:

• Install Flash Player 20 on your computer.
  This is not the easiest, but not very difficult either. Below we will tell you how to do this.
  
  
• Use Gapminder Tools: //www.gapminder.org/tools/
  Since Flash Player is being used less and less, we are introducing a replacement for Gapminder World using the latest technology: Gapminder Tools.
  Gapminder Tools is still under development and may still have some bugs. However, we are working hard on polishing it at this very moment.

Using Gapminder World with Flash Player 20

Adobe offers installers to install a previous version of Flash Player. Below, we explain how you can use these to make Gapminder World work again on your computer.

You can run Gapminder World in a browser or use its offline version. The offline version requires you to download and install Gapminder World on your computer. If you’d rather use a browser, skip the Offline version instructions and move on to the browser part.

Help us help you!
If you find another way to run Gapminder World, have tested any of the untested scenarios and got Gapminder World to run, or have trouble with these guides, let us know on [email protected].

 

Gapminder World Offline version

Follow these instructions:

1. Uninstall the current version of Flash Player on your system.
2. Download the zip file with Flash Player installers from:
   https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_20.0.0.306_archive.zip
3. In the zip, go to the folder 20_0_r0_306.
4. Open one of the following files:
   
   Windows: flashplayer20_0r0_306_win.exe
   (tested)
   Apple OSX: flashplayer20_0r0_306_mac.dmg
   (not tested)
   
   This will install Flash Player 20 on your computer.
5. At the end of the installation process, be sure to select the option ‘Never check for update (not recommended)’ or at least ‘Notify me to install updates’.
   Remember: if you update Flash Player, Gapminder World will stop working again.
6. Go to: //www.gapminder.org/world-offline/
7. Click the big green button under Download to download Gapminder World Offline
8. Run the installation file that was downloaded.
9. Start the just installed program Gapminder World

If this worked for you, no need to read on. You can explore the data like before. 

 

Gapminder World Online in a browser: Firefox

We recommend using Firefox since it can use Flash Player 20 relatively easily. If you would like to use Gapminder World in a different browser than Firefox, skip to the next section. Warning: Running Gapminder World in browsers other than Firefox (or Opera) will be significantly more troublesome.

Follow these instructions:

1. If you don’t have Firefox, download and install it from: http://getfirefox.com
2. Uninstall the current version of Flash Player on your system if there is any.
3. Download the zip file with Flash Player installers from:
   https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_20.0.0.306_archive.zip
4. In the zip, go to the folder 20_0_r0_306.
5. Open one of the following files:
   
   Windows: flashplayer20_0r0_306_win.exe
   (tested, works)
   Apple OSX: flashplayer20_0r0_306_mac.dmg
   (not tested)
   
   This will install Flash Player 20 on your computer.
6. At the end of the installation process, be sure to select the option ‘Never check for update (not recommended)’ or at least ‘Notify me to install updates’.
   Remember: if you update Flash Player, Gapminder World will stop working again.
7. If your browser is still open, restart it.
8. Go to http://gapminder.org/world/

If this worked for you, no need to read on. You can explore the data like before.

If it didn’t work, go to this webpage: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html

• Check in step 1 if Flash is installed and if it’s version 20. If not, try again.
• Check in step 4 if Flash is enabled in your browser. If not, follow the guide to enable it.

Do not follow steps 2 and 3. Step 2 and 3 tell you how to install the latest version of Flash Player. Gapminder World doesn’t work with this version. You want to install an older version.

If none of the above works, you can install Gapminder World Offline (as described above).

 

Gapminder World Online in Other browsers

Warning: Running Gapminder World in browsers other than Firefox or Opera is not recommended and might not even work.

If you want to try anyway, follow these instructions:

1. Uninstall the current version of Flash Player on your system if there is any.
2. Download the zip file with Flash Player installers from:
   https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_20.0.0.306_archive.zip
3. In the zip, go to the folder 20_0_r0_306.
   
   
4. The online version of Gapminder World runs in your browser. For example Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge. Which flash installer you need is dependent on which browser you use.
   
   This does NOT work with Microsoft Edge or a recent version of Internet Explorer or Chrome. If you are using older versions of Internet Explorer or Chrome, it might work. We did not test this and recommend using Firefox or Opera and the installer for Firefox or Opera indicated below.Open one of the files below to install Flash Player 20 on your computer.
   
   • Windows and Opera: flashplayer20_0r0_306_winpep.exe
     (tested, works!)
   • Windows and Chrome: flashplayer20_0r0_306_winpep.exe
     (does not work on latest Chrome. Maybe on old versions of Chrome, not tested)
   • Windows and Internet Explorer: flashplayer20_0r0_306_winax.exe
     (Does not work on Windows 8.1 and 10. Maybe Windows 7 and before, not tested)
   • Apple OSX and Firefox: flashplayer20_0r0_306_mac.dmg
     (not tested)
   • Apple OSX and Opera: flashplayer20_0r0_306_macpep.dmg
     (not tested)
   • Apple OSX and Safari: flashplayer20_0r0_306_mac.dmg
     (not tested)
   • Linux: not tested
     
     
5. At the end of the installation process, be sure to select the option ‘Never check for update (not recommended)’ or at least ‘Notify me to install updates’.
   Remember: if you update Flash Player, Gapminder World will stop working again.
6. If your browser is still open, restart it
7. Go to http://gapminder.org/world/

Gapminder World should work again.

If it doesn’t, go to this webpage: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html

• Check in step 1 if Flash is installed and if it’s version 20.
• Check in step 4 if Flash is enabled in your browser.

Do not follow steps 2 and 3. Step 2 and 3 tell you how to install the latest version of Flash Player. Gapminder World doesn’t work with this version. You want to install an older version.

If none of the above works, try to install Firefox or Opera and the corresponding Flash version. Alternatively, you can install Gapminder World Offline (as described above).

 

If you want to contribute to our educational material, please register here and we’ll contact you:

Gapminder for teachers

Gapminder för lärare (på Svenska)

“DON’T PANIC, How to End Poverty” is a one-hour documentary film produced by Wingspan Productions for This World on BBC2 . Presently BBC makes the film available in UK only. Outside UK, there are two trailers on Youtube. The presenter, Professor Hans Rosling, is co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation which supplied the data and the underlying visualizations used in the film.

Below are the data sources used for the visualizations in the film, sorted by order of appearance. Where possible, the links to data sources are given as well as a brief summary of Gapminder’s work of merging, curating and rounding numbers for visual clarity.

Explore the data bubble chart with Child mortality and GDP per capita in this Interactive Bubble Chart.

Explore the income distributions of all countries in this interactive tool.

General note

At Gapminder we are continuously updating our data. Hence, some of the data you see might be based on an earlier revision. We compile and curate data to make major global trends easy to understand. We strongly advise against using our compiled and curated data from different sources for numeric analysis or official purposes. Reason being that we do considerable simplifications and gap-filling in order to facilitate understanding,  We welcome critique, comments and advice about any data we have used or not used. We invite people to suggest improvements and to contribute with additional sources.

We think of our work as similar to the early works of cartographers. The first world maps were considerably wrong when it came to many details, but they still provided a big picture which hadn’t existed before. Over time quality global statistics improve thanks to  careful revision, just like the world maps got better and better. Think is true also for income distribution data. The research on world income distribution is still in an early stage, and we still don’t have representative data for all countries. However the quality of the picture is gradually improving thanks to with higher granularity of this very important data. But a coherent big picture of the changing pattern of world income distribution has already emerged which is consistently reproduced in a wide range of alternative sources.

1. Mapping extreme poverty on the spinning globe

The most recent estimate of the total the number in extreme poverty is: 836 million people. We show it as 84 dots on the world map, each representing 10 million people. The number of dots per country was decided by rounding the numbers from World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report 2014/2015, table 1, page 19. The positions of dots within countries were guided by Poverty Maps from two sources: World Bank & Worldpop. The underlaying map was prepared by Max Roser and Hans Rosling.

2. Income Distribution in Sweden

The yellow bell curve shows the position of the Swedish population on The Adjusted Global Income Scale described below. The relative poverty line of Sweden is positioned based on the official definition of “Relative Low Economic Standard” in Sweden “A household with a disposable income, adjusted with consideration to the dependency burden, lower than 60 percent of the median value in the population.“ The median income is horizontal position where you find the top of the bell curve. We draw the Swedish line at 60% of the median income. Here are two reports from Statistics Sweden discussing the relative poverty in Sweden: Increasing relative poverty rate(2012)  The increasing number of people at risk of falling below the line (2013)

Sweden’s horizontal position on the total scale is determined by the World Bank estimate for GDP per capita in PPP 2011, from World Development Indicators: 44029 $/year for the year 2014. We extrapolated the number to year 2015 using the IMF projections in World Economic Outlook April 2015 edition. The width of Swedish bell curve shows the distribution of people on different income levels, based on the most recent Gini available from Eurostat SILC: 24.9 for year 2014, “Gini coefficient of equivalised disposable income.” We use this Gini from 2014 for the year 2015 as the change in Gini for Sweden is expected to be extremely small.

3. Income Distribution in Malawi

The blue bell curve shows the position of the Malawi population on the Adjusted Global Income Scale described below. The extreme poverty line on this scale is 1.85$/day as described below. Malawi’s horizontal position is determined by the World Bank estimate for GDP per capita in PPP 2011, from World Development Indicators: 784 PPP$/year, for the year 2014. We extrapolated the number to year 2015 using the IMF projections in World Economic Outlook April 2015 edition. The width of Malawi’s bell curve shows the distribution of people on different income levels, based on the most recent Gini avaialble: 45.2 for year 2011. This Gini comes from the dataset The UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database (WIID) (v3.0B). It is the most recent number prefered by Milanovic in “All the Ginis”, defining it as representative for the whole population, measuring the distribution of households based on their Per capita consumption. We use this Gini from 2011 to show Malawi in 2015, as the distribution of income has most likely not changed much.

4. The Extreme Poverty Line

The line for extreme poverty is set to 1.85$ per day in PPP 2011. It differs from the 1.25$ /day which is in PPP2005. The recent official Poverty Line of the World Bank and UN is 1.25$/day adjusted for international prices in year 2005. But prices change. Our slightly higher level for the poverty line is an adjustment for the 2011 price comparisons like the rest of the graph. The World Bank recently published a new round of global price comparisons from the International Comparison Program; called PPP 2011; meaning Purchasing Power Parity in prices of year 2011. We use those for our GDP per capita series and income scales throughout the film. We expect the UN & the World Bank will soon update the official Poverty Line to these recent price levels based on this Working paper. Meanwhile we have positioned the new poverty line at 1.85$ per day according to the new PPP 2011.

5. Dollar Street

The photos and videos come from the Dollar Street project which is a visual teaching framework for understanding how everybody lives. It was invented by Anna Rosling Rönnlund who is also the Product Manager of Gapminder. The project will launch later in 2015. To learn more watch this TEDx talk about Dollar Street. To not miss the launch you can follow Dollar Street on facebook.

6. Global Poverty Rate Long Trend

The long trend for global poverty rate is a combination of three data sources:

— Source for 2015: UN official Poverty rate

The official MDG website express the official UN estimate vaguely as “At the global level more than 800 million people are still living in extreme poverty.” here. The precise estimate is available on page 15 in the MDG report for 2015: 836 million people below 1.25$/day globally. We divide this estimate with the UN official estimate of the present world population: 7 349 million people. 836/7349 =  11.3% of world population are in extreme poverty.

— Source for 1981 to 2011. World Bank, PovCalNet

Estimates of global Poverty Rate are available from World Bank’s PovCalNet, or here. We use the indicator “Poverty headcount ratio at $1.25 a day (PPP) (& of population) , which is defined as “Population below $1.25 a day is the percentage of the population living on less than $1.25 a day at 2005 international prices.“  

— Sources before 1981: Economic History Researchers

We aligned our trend with two historical sources that have very similar estimates.

— “Inequality Among World Citizens” 1820–1992 By Francois Bourguignon and christian morrisson FRANCOIS BOURGUIGNON AND CHRISTIAN MORRISSON

— Page 40 in “The changing shape of Global Inequality – exploring a new dataset” (Zanden, Baten, Foldvari, Leeuwen)

We have recreated the poverty rates of these historical sources, by using the same method, but relying on more recent estimates of historic GDP per capita and added estimates for missing countries and years. This is further described in the section Adjusted Global Incomes below. This work was done jointly by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling & Max Roser. You can see the alternative series here: OurWorldInData

7. Global Population Trend

Data for the period 1950 to 2015 comes from UN Population Division. Data for the period 1950 to 2015 comes from UN Population Division. Estimates before 1950 comes primarily from International Historical Statistics compiled by Mitchell and the Maddison Project, with many minor additions by Gapminder. We sum up the population estimates of all countries to get the total World population.

8. World Income Distribution

You can explore the income distributions of all countries in this interactive tool.

This graph is constructed by combining data from multiple sources. In summary, we take the best available country estimates for the three indicators: GDP per capita, Population and Gini (which is a measure of income inequality). With these numbers we can approximate the number of people on different income levels in every country. We then combine all these approximations into a global pile using the method described below under The Adjusted Global Income Scale.

9. World Quiz — Correct Answers

The sources for the data behind each of the three questions are given below:

— Question 1 “How many people out of 10 have electricity at home? The indicator used is “The percentage of population with access to electricity”. The data is collected by the World Bank from industry, national surveys and international sources.  The latest estimate for the World is 83% for the year 2010. Historical data for access to electricity are estimated based on this documentation from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.

— Question 2 “How many children out of ten are vaccinated against measles? The indicator is “The percent of children that received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday”.  One dose is enough to protect against measles if the child gets it before their first birthday.  Data is compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO).

— Question 3 “How many girls out of 10 go to primary school? This indicator is called “Adjusted net enrollment rate, Primary” and measures the percent of primary school-age girls that attend primary school. The age-range and length of primary school varies between countries. The data is provided by the World Bank and the latest estimate for the world is 90% in 2013. Historical data for the percent of girls in the World that attended primary school are roughly extrapolated backwards using the historic trends in literacy summarized here “Our World in Data”.

10. Child Mortality vs. GDP Per Capita

You can explore the data in this bubble chart Interactive Bubble Chart.

The vertical axis shows an indicator called Child Mortality Rate: “Yearly mortality under age five, per 1000 live born”. In this film it is expressed as %. The primary data source is The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. Their trend data cover most countries back to 1950 and for several countries all the way back to 1930. The historical stats before 1950 are compiled by Mattias Lindgren at Gapminder, from many different historical sources, documented here. We extrapolated the series up to 2015 using the projections from UN Population Division.

The horizontal axis shows GDP per capita in Constant International Dollars which are adjusted for price differences between countries and price changes over time. The main data source is the World Bank’s GDP per capita in PPP 2011, from World Development Indicators, which is based on PWT 8.1. Those trends often end in 2013, and we extrapolated them up to year 2015 using the IMF projections of World Economic Outlook April 2015 edition. The World Bank series only goes back to 1980. Before 1980 we have linked the historic growth rates from the Maddison Project, as well as additional trends from Gapminder’s historic GDP per capita estimates.

The size of the Bubbles show the total population in each country. Data for the period 1950 to 2015 comes from UN Population Division. Estimates before 1950 comes primarily from International Historical Statistics compiled by Mitchell and the Maddison Project, with many minor additions by Gapminder.

11. Aid Levels

The aid levels in the film are based on estimates of the amount of international development assistance per person in extreme poverty in different country income groups. The data-source is “Financing the Future” from Overseas Development Institute, ODI” and the report as well as the datasets are available online.

12. Family Size by Income

People below the extreme poverty do not live only in the poorest countries. Some live in middle income countries. To estimate the combined Fertility Rate of the poorest people, we can not just use country averages. We used data that divide countries into five different groups based on their economic resources; so called wealth quintiles. The underlying data is available here: WHO Health Observatory, which derived those estimates from DHS surveys. We assume that the people in each wealth-quintile coincide with the people in the income quintiles from Income Surveys provided by World Development Indicators: such as 20% poorest part of total GDP. Those were used to express the Income per Capita of the people in each wealth-quintile and work was done by Max Roser, who published the quintile plot here. For some countries this kind of granular data is missing and we couldn’t extract the poorest part of the population to our sum. We believe the estimate 5 children per family, is actually lower than what we would have gotten if  quintile data had been available for more countries.

The Adjusted Global Income Scale

Background

When comparing people’s economic standard of living within a country, it’s preferable to compare disposable income after social transfers (such as taxes and welfare programs). But for international comparisons, those national-measures are not simple to use because welfare-systems and tax-systems differ widely across countries. So far, there exist no single data source that adjusts for the wide differences across a majority of countries. Instead, when investigating long trends of  global income distribution, researchers are using less accurate measures which are more comparable. The only economic indicator which is widely available and sufficiently standardized to allow for historic international comparisons is GDP per capita.

Preferably the global income distribution should be visualized based on comparable global household surveys with a comparable measure for disposable income, adjusted not only for differences in cost of living between countries, but also for differences within countries. Unfortunately no such income survey with global coverage exists, not even for a single year. We strongly agree with Branko Milanovic about the urgent need for such comparable surveys, especially for the purpose of monitoring the UN poverty-goal. In the absence of such survey, we and others are forced to rely on less reliable methods.

But it’s still a reasonable alternative. Here’s a comparison by Martin Ravallion. He concludes that the GDP-per-capita-based-method, which we use, actually results in a very similar general poverty trends as the more accurate survey-based-method. The different methods yield income results that are different in terms of income level, but they are similar in terms of the percentage change over time.

The GDP-based method summarized

The Global Income Distribution graph is basically an animating clone of  static graphs from the leading researchers in this field of Economic History: “The changing shape of Global Inequality – exploring a new dataset” (Zanden, Baten, Foldvari, Leeuwen). We use the same method, but with more up-to-date numbers. The method goes like this:

— Step 1. We use three data points for each country and year: Population, GDP per capita and Gini  (Gini expresses how skewed the income distribution is within a population; See Wikipedia).

— Step 2. We assume the distribution is log-normal in every country and year, which means the population pile up like a bell curve on a logarithmic income scale. This assumption is common among economist using this method, and it’s surprisingly solid when compared to empirical data.

— Step 3. We draw the bell curve for every country on a global logarithmic income scale. The width of the curve depends on the Gini and horizontal position depends on the GDP per capita. The areas of the bell curves are relative to the population of the country.

— Step 4.We stack the shapes of the country bell curves on top of each other for each region, and then we stack the regions on top of each other and we get one a single global shape showing everybody in the world by income level.

Gapminder’s Level-Adjustments

Zanden’s group has kindly shared their method and data with us.  We have then extended their data series beyond 2000, up to year 2015 using primarily Ginis recommended by Milanovic in “All the Ginis” . Zandens group uses a GDP per capita in PPP 2005. We switched to use GDP per capitas in PPP 2011 from World Development Indicators, which are based on the PWT 8.1. We then adjust the old GDP per capita levels by applying the growth rates from the Maddison Project so they are lifted to the new PPP levels of 2011. The World Bank series mostly ends in 2013 or 2014 and we have extrapolated them up to year 2015 using the IMF projections in World Economic Outlook April 2015 edition. To reach up to 2015 we have used the latest available gini from all countries and this gives us an “updated version” of the graph in Zanden’s paper.

As Martin Ravallion discusses the GDP-based numbers are comparable in terms of trends to the survey-based numbers. But the levels are systematically higher. In this presentation we wanted to give a coherent story that required combining data from the two different methods;

— 1. official trends of poverty rates originating from income surveys.

—2. global income distributions based on GDP per capita.

Therefor we adjust the GDP-based data to be aligned with survey-based sources which are more accurate. This adjustment are done in two steps:

— 1. Anchoring below the poverty line: We adjust all income levels so the people below the poverty line are aligned with the survey based method. The global income scale from the GDP-based method, is moved so everybody’s incomes get lower and 11.3% of world population are below the extreme poverty line of 1.85$/day (in PPP 2011) in year 2015.

— 2. Anchoring above the poverty line: We stretch the income-scale so the distribution of the richer people are better aligned with the survey-based method. We did this by visually comparing to the most accurate up-to-date survey-based picture of world income distribution, namely the graph for 2008 in figure A.2 in “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession” ( Lakner & Milanovic, 2015).

Interact with the Income Mountain Tool to see how different countries relate to each other. But please beware the warning sign about DATA DOUBTS and stay tuned to our continuous data improvements!

Stockholm 23 September 2015 by Hans Rosling & Ola Rosling.

Questions: [email protected]

Feedback: mailto:[email protected]

 

(for Swedish Radio P1, Transcript and translation by Harald Hultqvist)

Reporter: One of those who are working to stem the spread of the virus is Hans Rosling, Professor of Global Health, Karolinska Institute, currently on location in Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

Rep: Good morning.
Hans Rosling: Good morning.

Rep: We understand that you have just produced a new set of numbers for the UN showing the ratio of the spread of Ebola and these are numbers that we have not seen before. What do they show?
Rosling: Well it is not for the UN, but I work for the [Liberian] Ministry of Health. I have got a desk in the room of the state epidemiologist Luce Bawo, so I work directly together with the national leadership of the [fight against the] epidemic.
The figures we are looking at are both reported cases, hospitalized, how many funerals are conducted and how many calls are made to the emergency phones. We try to make an overall assessment, and our view is now that this surge of more and more people getting ill has been discontinued. Now it’s about the same number of people getting sick every day. And this may sound like the numbers should have gone down, but what is very important is that this rise has now been stopped. But in our conclusion lies the fact that in some counties, in some parts of the country, there is an increasing number of cases, and in others it decreases.

Rep: It sounds like you are describing a hopeful development. What is required for it to last?
Rosling: That we get hospitals and enough resources to every county in the country. I would describe this as a wildfire that began in one corner of the country and then spread to the capital. And those are the places where one have now overcome it. Especially where it started one have overcome it and it’s very positive. In the capital it’s bad, but it does not get worse. However, there are small wildfires in every county in the country. This requires resources in a different way. Right now there are no overcrowded hospitals or people dying in the street. But there is quite a job to be done across the country, and particularly at the borders. Liberia borders Côte d’Ivoire and there have been no cross-border cases yet. But as we heard on the news today, most unfortunately a disease transmission to Mali has occurred, Mali being a neighbor two countries away from here.

Rep: If there is a little shift in focus towards what needs to be done to prevent the spread across borders to neighboring countries, what is the action you are talking about?
Rosling: There are two things: one is that the person who is ill must be taken care of so that he or she is isolated and does not infect anyone else, and this is extremely difficult for the families to do at home. Inevitably there will be occasional cases of transmission if one is to take care of these critically ill patients at home. That’s the first one. The second thing needed is a general knowledge in the population about how dangerous this is. It has really been embraced here in the capital. I have never seen a city so orderly during an ongoing crisis. Outside of every shop there is a container with chlorine water and everyone washes their hands. No one shakes hands. You go through a small foot bath to clean your feet too. Actually, we wash hands carefully not only to avoid Ebola, but everyone wants to avoid all other infectious diseases, even myself. You do not want to get a cold or diarrhea when it could be suspected to be Ebola. So there is a huge tightening of behavior. And yet, the city is completely calm, it’s really nice to be here. People are polite. I have never met so many positive smiling people, who say: Thanks for coming, it is great. And yet they work so hard themselves with this. So it’s a very positive feeling to be involved in this work.

Rep: Do you mean that this kind of crisis can also lead to good things in a society?
That might come later, but right now we just have to take care of the present, and that is what people are doing. There is no chaos here, there’s no panic, everyone move on and do their job. I work together with a chauffeur on a daily basis and we have quickly become acquainted, and the people who help me to make my mobile phone work, all these people are very helpful and there is a positive atmosphere.

Rep: If you look at what Liberia needs from the outside world right now?
They need three things. They need help with staff, with persons like me. The domestic state epidemiologist I work with, he is very skilled, very talented, but there are not enough people with that experience. Therefore, we need experts. From people like me to experienced nurses and nursing instructors who can train all those who need training. So, staff is needed. Money is needed. It is unfortunately very expensive to do this quickly, after all the countries are rather big. And then we will need persistence. This is not something that will be over in a month or two. We have to stay for a long time, since the objective is to eradicate this virus from spreading among people. We can not eradicate it among animals but we can eradicate it among the people. It must be done and then you have to hold on for a long time.

Rep: So in conclusion, if you could give any advice, if there are any policy makers who listen to this and have to make decisions?
I do not think there is anything more profitable to do in the world right now than to put an end to this epidemic, because if we do not stop it now, it will be much more expensive later on. So even though it’s not cheap to stop it now, it’s a bargain price to fix it now, compared to doing it later. And those who are able to make their own knowledge available, do it. You will feel positive. I think of these Churchill quotes all the time: this is not the end, it is not the beginning of the end, it’s only the end of the beginning that we see. It will keep on for a long time. And this particular working atmosphere you sense while working here; it surprised me. I thought people would be annoyed and yell at each other and be nervous and cry. No no, it’s really a nice working atmosphere.

Rep: Thank you Hans Rosling.

How to get the latest numbers offline

DON´T PANIC, is a one-hour documentary film produced by Wingspan Productions for This World on BBC2 and others. The film covers world population, income distribution and the use of fossil fuel. The presenter, Professor Hans Rosling, is the co-founder of Gapminder Foundation, and Gapminder also supplied the data shown in the program and the educational concepts on which the program’s graphics are based.

The video can be found here.

The film contains 12 different graphic data presentations. This document list below the sources of the data used in each of these presentations.  Where possible the link to data sources is given as well as brief summaries of how Gapminder´s  work in merging, curating and rounding-up the numbers to enable clear visualization of major global trends.

 

1. The changing size of the world population from 10 million in 10,000 BC to 7 billion in 2012

The estimates for the time period up to 1950 are mainly based on

Atlas of the World Population History. McEvedey C, Jones R. Penguin 1978, and Biraben JN, An Essay Concerning Mankind’s Evolution, Population, Selected Papers, Dec 1980, Table 2.

The estimates for the period from 1950 up to the present are mainly from “World Population Prospect: The 2012 revision”, published by UN Population Division in 2013 http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm

 

2. The average number of babies born per woman (total fertility rate) and lifespan (life expectancy at birth) in Bangladesh and in all countries of the world from 1963 up to 2012

This link take you to the interactive bubble graph called “Gapminder World” with the above indicators pre-selected:  www.bit.ly/17e5QVc

The data for each indicator are compiled from various sources, and you find information by clicking on the data sheet symbol at the beginning of each axis.

Fertility rate: //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd008/

Life expectancy:  //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd004/

Population: //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd003/

 

3. UK public knowledge  about the average number of babies born per woman in Bangladesh

The source is from a web-survey – the first of its kind –  that was done by Gapminder in collaboration with two survey companies as described in the “Highlights” document published here (question 6):

//www.gapminder.org/news/highlights-from-ignorance-survey-in-the-uk/

 

4. Average number of babies born per women in the world and proportion of these babies that died before growing up to become parents themselves in 1800, 1960 and at present

The details of the surviving off-spring is based on the following:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArtujvvFrPjVdGdFWmhqOEVXcUZha1hJWXAtWHlDSFE&gid=1

Chance of survival to 35 years of age were calculated for each country-year by selecting a model life table which matched the life expectancy for that country-year. This chance were multiplied with the total fertility rate for that country-year. The estimates utilized the following data.

Gapminder life expectancy:   //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd004/

Gapminder total fertility rate:  //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd008/

World population prospect Model Life table:  (UN general, females) http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Model-Life-Tables/download-page.html

 

5. Projection of the size of the world population as well as the number of children aged 0-14 in the world from 1800 to 2012 and the projection up to 2100

The estimates for the time period up to 1950 are mainly based on

Atlas of the World Population History. McEvedey C, Jones R. Penguin 1978, and Biraben JN, An Essay Concerning Mankind’s Evolution, Population, Selected Papers, Dec 1980, Table 2.

The estimates for the period from 1950 up to the present  are mainly from and and for future projections are entierly from “World Population Prospect: The 2012 revision”, published by UN Population Division in 2013 http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm

 

6. The big inevitable fill-up of adults showing present and projected age distribution of the world population in 15 years age group and rounded-up to the nearest full billion

The source is “World Population Prospect: The 2012 revision”, published by UN Population Division in 2013

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.

 

7. Distribution of present world population as well as projected world population for years 2050 and 2100

The countries of the world are divided into four regions:  the Americas; Europe (including Turkey, the nations in Caucasus, and the whole of Russia); Africa; and Asia; with population number rounded up to the nearest one billion.

The source is the last “World Population Prospect: The 2012 revision”, published by UN Population Division in 2013

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.

 

8. The range of average income per person between each of the world´s seven billions when ranked from lowest to highest income and expressed in purchasing power parity dollar.

The income distribution within countries is based on data that is yet only partly published made available by the work of:  Van Zanden JL, Foldvari P, Van Leeuwen B, Baten J. The changing shape of Global Inequality – exploring a new dataset http://ideas.repec.org/p/ucg/wpaper/0001.html .

Some additions & modifications are done by Gapminder and this is a work in progress. The rough rounded numbers are based on the population and GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Parity USD adjusted and corrected for inflation with base year 2005 from the default graph in Gapminder World  www.gapminder.org/world

GDP/capita in PPP:  //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd001/

Population: //www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd003/

 

9. UK public knowledge in the UK about the percentage of adult literacy in the world population

The source is from a web-survey – the first of its kind –  that was done by Gapminder in collaboration with two survey companies as described in the “Highlights” document published here (question 2):

//www.gapminder.org/news/highlights-from-ignorance-survey-in-the-uk/

 

10. Life expectancy &  GDP/capita in purchasing power parity for all countries from 1800 up to 2012.

The data sources are those used in the default graph in www.gapminder.org/world

The data for each indicator compiled from various sources, and to find information on this you click on the data sheet symbol at the beginning of each axis.

 

11. Income distribution of the populations in America, Europe (countries as in presentation 7), Africa and Asia from 1963 to 2012

The main source is: Van Zanden JL, Foldvari P, Van Leeuwen B, Baten J. The changing shape of Global Inequality – exploring a new dataset  http://ideas.repec.org/p/ucg/wpaper/0001.html

 

12. The estimated percentage of the global fossil fuel consumption used by each of the world´s 7 billion when ranked according to the income of each billion.

The main source of the use of fossil fuel is from International Energy Agency;

http://data.iea.org/IEASTORE/DEFAULT.ASP

The distribution across the seven billion have been done using country data for population and GDP/capita as referred to above, except for China for which data on each of five income quintiles were used and fossil fuel consumption was distributed between these quintiles assuming that fuel use related to income level in china as it does in the world as a whole based on national data.

 

General note: At Gapminder we are continuously updating our data. Hence, some of the data you see might be based on an earlier revision of our data. We compile and curate data to make major global trends easy to understand. We strongly advice against using our compiled and curated data from different sources for analytic or official purposes. As we do considerable simplifications and gap-filling in order to gain in understanding we welcome critique, comments and advice re the data we have used.

Stockholm 6 Nov 2013  by Hans Rosling,

mail:   [email protected]

 

BBC2 at 9 pm 7 Nov will broadcast DON´T PANIC, a documentary in which Hans Rosling use Gapminder style graphics to explain major global trends re population, economy and energy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/45/this-world-hans-rosling.html 

A trailer with the new Yardstick of Wealth for the world  is available here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpdyCJi3Ib4

 

We’re looking for a skilled Software Engineer in Stockholm to work with us building new cool open source visualizations. This is a permanent position starting ASAP, requiring JavaScript, CSS, Java & SQL experience.

Tell friends and family everywhere: Before the end of the year, the application is here… 

 

Human Development Index HDI is advanced as being a better indicator than “GDP per capita” in measuring the progress of Nations. HDI is calculated by UNDP from indicators for health, education and living standard (income/person). The methodology is quite complicated but it well documented http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi/

BUT look at a plot of the correlation between HDI and GDP/capita or all countries in Gapminder World www.bit.ly/XxQw0B You will be surprised! There is today a very strong correlation between rising GDP/capita. If you exclude 6 countries on the right side of the strong correlation that have higher GDP/capita than HDI due to oil or diamonds; and if you exclude 6 former Soviet Republics with collapsed economy but still high literacy rate on the left side of the correlation; you will find that the GDP/capita and the value on Human Development Index follow each other very closely from the worst-off country Congo to the best-off country Norway. The reason seems to be that nations today are surprisingly capable in converting the available national income (measured as GDP/capita) into a longer lifespan for the people (measured as Life expectancy at birth) and into access to education (measured by mean of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age).  But the reason may also be that nations today are very good at converting improved health and education into economic growth. Most probably the causality goes in both directions.

In conclusions:  If you want better health and education fix economic growth. If you want faster economic growth provide better education and health service. GDP/capita appears to be as good a measure of progress of nations as are HDI.

Hans Rosling

UN just published estimates for child mortality in all countries in 2010!  http://www.unicef.org/media/files/Child_Mortality_Report_2011_Final.pdf

It is a well documented compilation that brings much good news! Child mortality counted as deaths < 5 years per 1000 born has dropped in Tanzania that had:

1995:  155 deaths per 1000 born (Sweden had this rate 1896)

2010:   76 deaths per 1000 born (Sweden had this rate 1928)

This means that what Tanzania achieved in the last 15 years took Sweden 32 years to do! Tanzania improves with twice the speed of historical Sweden. They are catching-up. Tanzania´s average annual rate of reduction of child mortality over the last 15 years was 4.6 %. The Millennium Development Goal rate set by UN is an annual average rate of reduction of 4.3%!  Tanzania is moving faster! But during the 5 years between 1990 and 1995 the child mortality in Tanzania was stagnant at about 155 per 1000 born. Some still measure MDG rate from 1990 and says Tanzania is not moving fast enough. But this is ridiculous (sorry for hard but true word). The MDG´s were set in 2000 and the use of a retrospective starting point makes no sense 10 years later. It is the speed of progress that matter, not the distance covered from a point back in history! Honor to Tanzania that is moving faster than MDG rate.  Honor also to those that assisted in this magnificent achievement in reducing child mortality!

Hans Rosling

People ask me: DO you believe UNAIDS data saying that less than 0.1 % of adults in Pakistan  are HIV infected? YES I DO, the estimate is not based on reporting but on surveys. The uncertainty is wide, yet all surveys indicate that only a fraction of one percent of adults live with HIV in Pakistan. See Gapminder World www.bit.ly/mSuVw6

Next question is: SO because it is a Muslim country you don´t think there are sex workers in Pakistan ?  Now I can answer because I read a new excellent thesis; “Poverty of Opportunity for Women Selling Sex in Lahore, Pakistan”, by Mohsin Saeed Khan. He concludes that a substantial number of women do sell sex in Pakistan. Through respectful interviews and yet with the highest scientific rigor Dr Khan reveals an emerging pattern with several different ways in which sex is sold. Ranging from brothels to selling in your own home. All for the same sad reasons as in other parts of the world.  Khan surprisingly finds that most of the women selling sex in Lahore are married. He explains how (1) an increasing and by now relatively high condom use and (2) a relatively low number of returning clients have limited the spread of HIV. This thesis shows how HIV prevention and empowerment of poor women needs to be based on different types of local realities that can be studied and understood anywhere in the world. http://publications.ki.se/jspui/handle/10616/40537

Hans Rosling

A decade ago I lectured to the staff of the Ministry of Health in Cuba. After my talk the Minister happily said, this graphs showed that Cuba is the healthiest of the poor countries! On the way out a young staff member whispered in my ear:

– He is wrong, Cuba is just the poorest of the healthy countries.

Gapminder World describes that both were right, www.bit.ly/l02EOP People in Cuba has the same life span  as Chile, Portugal, South Korea, Greece and USA. But Cuba has the lowest income per person of all these countries with Life Expectancy of 79 years! Is Cuba´s upper left position due to good health policy or bad economic policy?  I would say YES due to both reason, and now it seems as the new leader is fed up with the bad economic policy and starts to allows some privet enterprises in Cuba. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/05/17/cuba.private.businesses/index.html

Hans Rosling

Look at the great catch up of Ireland since the terrible famine in 1849. That year the lifespan in Ireland, 20 years, was estimated to half of that in UK! And the estimated income per person in Ireland was only 1/3 of that in UK.

But Ireland has cached up and overtaken the former colonial ruler in both income and health. Note in Gapminder World that Ireland in spite of the economic downturn still has a higher average income per person than UK www.bit.ly/imxm1V . The latest data from IMF displayed in Google public data explorer confirms that Ireland still remains ahead of UK in GDP per capita when comaprision is made in purchasing power parity.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=k3s92bru78li6_&ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=ppppc&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country_group&idim=country:IE:GB&tstart=315532800000&tunit=Y&tlen=36&hl=en&dl=en&uniSize=0.035&iconSize=0.5

Hans Rosling

The five countries with the highest oil reserves per person  are UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia & Libya.  All five score very low, from -7 to -10, in democracy (the scores run from +10 to -10)!  Of these five countries Libya has the lowest amounts of oil reserves per person; and therefore perhaps the highest chance for democracy? www.bit.ly/iLTom2

Hans Rosling 20 May 2011

Michel Martelly was sworn in Saturday as the new president of Haiti. He face a relay tough task!

Since 1950 GDP/capita has not grown at all, it remains around 1 thousand dollar per person in Haiti. In spite of this Life expectancy has increased from 36 to 61 years. So with money sent home from relatives in US and modern health technology people do get more health for the buck! But so far they have got no more bucks.

In contrast, the close by Caribbean Island nation Barbados (where a dominant part of the population also are of African origin) increased GDP/capita 5-fold to 15 thousand dollar per person in Barbados. Barbados increase Life expectancy to 78 years, just one year less than USA! In fact blacks in Barbados live longer than blacks in USA.

Look at the chockingly different trails in income and health of Barbados and Haiti in Gapminder World www.bit.ly/l6qlRc

Ask your teacher or find out yourself; Why are the outcome for populations of African origin so different in different nations in the Americas!

Azerbaijan not only won the European Song Contest 2011, it also has among the highest oil and natural gas production per person in the world www.bit.ly/iNksgW

Not only has the income per person steadily imporved since 1995, but so has also the mean number of years in school for women and Azerbadjan has today higher GDP/ capita than the two neigbouring Caucasian nations. www.bit.ly/iFAigh

So given the modest developemtn level at the independence from Soviet in 1991, Azerbaijan is now a successful European country. But is this muslim country really European?

Yes it is European, because Azerbaijan is a member of the Councel of Europa   http://www.coe.int/aboutcoe/index.asp?page=47pays1europe&l=en , it is a member of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) where Azerbaijan ranks 37 of 53 members http://www.uefa.com/memberassociations/uefarankings/country/index.html and as of tonight Azerbaijan is the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. Interestingly wealth and health of country has no importance for the chance of winning the Song Contest. Winning must be interpreted as a cultural and political expression of being part of Europe. Look at the GDP/capita (6000 to 48 000 dollar)  and Life Expectancy (67 to 81 years) of the last 10 winners of Eurovision Song Contest in Gapminder World: www.bit.ly/jIlz5u

Hans Rosling

The economic growth in Africa is more than 5% per year and that is faster than world average. Companies in emerging economies (=middle income countries or BRIC) are more positive to invest in Africa than are those i high income countries says report from World Economic Forum http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GCR_Africa_Report_2011.pdf

Look how so many countries in Africa in this century have replaced th stagnation in the 1990íes with fast economic growth www.bit.ly/iTjffl

Today at the airport in Stockholm I met a happy Swedish couple flying out to their new investment abroad! They had renovated and opened a hotel on “Ihla”,  the historic capital in northern Mocambique. Obviously done the right thing to do. International Monetary Fund, IMF tell us that there is now fast economic growth throughout East Africa. Look at the data and forecast of GDP/capita in Public Data Explorer http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=k3s92bru78li6_&ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=ppppc&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country_group&idim=country:KE:RW:MZ:TZ&tstart=315532800000&tunit=Y&tlen=36&hl=en&dl=en&iconSize=0.5&uniSize=0.035

35 years ago Ivory Coast and Egypt had the same GDP/capita and the same Life Expectancy. In  this year of revolution Egyptians have 4 fold better GDP/capita and live more than 10 years longer than Ivorians. So Egypt did progress in health and economy during Mubarak, but people also want democracy. Ivory Coast today had its elected president swarm in but he has to face a much worse challenge in Ivory Coast that the upcoming elected president will have in Egypt. Look at this graph www.bit.ly/lq03kk

Hans Rosling

At independence in 1972 people in Bangladesh lived on average 1o years shorter than in Pakistan, whereas both countries had very large families, 7 children per women.

Bangladesh has in the last 4 decades increased the life span from 44 to 67 years; now on par with Pakistan. In the change to small families Bangladesh has dropped from 7 to 2.3 children per women, whereas Pakistan still has almost 4 children per women. Considering that Pakistan has almost twice the GDP/capita compared to Bangladesh, the county has under-performed in health and family welfare. Click on link to look at the graph showing family size and life span in Gapminder World where I have colored the country bubbles by “% of GDP spent on Military”. Bangladesh spends around 1 % through the last decades, whereas Pakistan is slowly coming down from 7 % ( put cursor on bubble an look in upper right corner) to now 3.3 % !  www.bit.ly/joKHtJ Seems wise to let military spending drop further and increase investments in women and children!

Hans Rosling

i Just became aware of how very exceptional the BUDGET of the Pakistan government is. The government spend 4% of GDP on military, as high as the much richer USA do!! In % of GDP USA and Pakistan have among the highest military spendings in the world!

But in health the countries are very different! US spends 15% of GDP on Health (highest in the world) and of this the US government spends 7% of GDP on health; whereas Pakistani health spending is only 2% the most dramatic is that the government contribution is less than one fifth of that, meaning 0.4% of GDP.

THE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT SPENDS TEN TIMES MORE ON MILITARY THAN ON HEALTH! THAT IS A REMARKABLE PROPORTION! See the relations here in Gapminder World where countries are bubbles, vertical is health spending , horizontal military spending and color percent of health spending from government, blue represents the lowest range and brown the highest range of government proportion in health spending. www.bit.ly/iKRzKL

 

 

Gapminder World now have longer and more complete data series on Energy and Oil data from IEA //www.gapminder.org/data-blog/oil-production-indicators-updated/ and //www.gapminder.org/data-blog/6-energy-indicators-added/

We have displayed best available data on deatsh in war, due to murder, suicide and trafic deaths //www.gapminder.org/data-blog/seven-indicators-added/

The Institute of Health Metrics have estimated mean number of years in school for men and women in different age-groups for almost all countries.
The methods used for these estimates are well-documented. This data reveal that there is no correlation between educations level in counatries and the % of adults living with HIV www.bit.ly/aI39Ql
You find these indicators in Gapminder World under Category Education and subcategory Mean years at School!

To allow your students to relax from the computer´s and still learn about the world Gapminder has made a quick-to-learn Card game that is free to download:
//www.gapminder.org/downloads/card-game/

What does Life expectancy really measure? Gapminder has made a free-to-download PowerPoint that you can use when teaching what Life expectancy really measures; and it is a pretty cool PowerPoint!
//www.gapminder.org/downloads/life-expectancy-ppt/

We have simplified the menu structure for data in Gapminder World to make it easier to find the data you are looking for. We now have only 10 categories (previously 14). The new categories are:

Economy
Education
Energy
Environment
Health
Infrastructure
Population
Society
Work
For advanced users

Diagram: For those of you who are used to the old structure, we have produced a diagram which shows how relationships between new and old categories. Download it here.

Fast search: If you are looking for a particular indicator it is always a really good idea to use the very speedy search function on our data page. You can search by name or category and quickly bring up a graph in Gapminder World or download the data in Excel.

A new Teacher´s Guide for lessons on global change since Industrial Revolution until today is available under the section For Teachers.
Teacher’s guide: Lesson on 200 years that changed the world
//www.gapminder.org/for-teachers/

ReadWriteWeb has published a long, useful and thoughtful comment on their experiences of Gapminder Desktop – we think this comment can be useful for many users to read! Go to:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/setting_data_free_with_gapminder.php

Gapminder Desktop can be downloaded from here:
www.gapminder.org/desktop/

Gapminder World now has an updated indicator for Teen Fertility Rate (births per 1,000 women ages 15-19). We have added time series for Sweden since 1800 and for US since 1940. Click the link and see the interesting peak in births among teenagers in Sweden in 1966. The drop coincide with the arrival of the pill.
www.bit.ly/dpWo2V

32 countries qualified to the Football World Cup in South Africa. In Gapminder World Cup you can see how they score on some football- as well as development indicators.

• Is the World Cup mostly for rich countries?
• Are rich countries generally more successful than poorer countries?
• Are populous countries better than smaller countries?

Statistics isn’t everything
Brazil is the highest ranked team in the world according to FIFA:s ranking. They have 26 times as many registered football players in the country as North Korea, the lowest ranked team in the World Cup. In spite of that, North Korea managed to score a goal and Brazil only won by 2-1. See this in Gapminder World Cup.

Who will qualify to the second round?
Europe got a bit of a bad start while the Americas were quite successful. Halfway through the qualifying round, the map looks like this:

Blue countries are first or second place in the group (in the qualifying position) and red means no qualification halfway into the qualifying leg. Follow the development here.

On 24 April 2010, professor Angus Maddison passed away at the age of 83. Maddison was an economist and economic historian and a pioneer in exploring the broad developments of the world through statistics.

His data has been a foundation for the work of Gapminder in several areas. In our work to construct longer time series for indicators such as GDP and income data for all countries of the world, Maddison’s groundbreaking work has been completely invaluable.

He will be missed.

Yesterday (April 20, 2010) the World Bank reveiled that it will offer free access to a huge amount of development statistics. This bold and longly awaited step to liberate the data gives students, researchers, designers, journalists and organizations access to important statistics.

At the same time the World Bank launches a brand new web site: data.worldbank.org that will make it easier to find and use the statistics you want.

World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick presented the new policy in a video where he also announced that the World Bank soon will launch an “apps for development competition”, challenging the developers community to develop the best tools for better understanding of development statistics.

Free access to public data is something that Hans Rosling, director of Gapminder, has been advocating for years. The World Bank’s webpage quotes him saying: “It’s the right thing to do, because it will foster innovation. That is the most important thing.”

• Go the the new data.worldbank.org
• Read the World Banks news post (including video)

About this video:
An interview with Hans Rosling for Ericsson’s “2020 Shaping Ideas” project. In the project, 20 global thinkers are asked to share their view of the drivers and trends for the future. This is Hans Rosling’s thoughts.

Read more about 2020 Shaping Ideas

As you can see, Gapminder’s web site has got a facelift, but also some helpful new features. Here are the most important new features that will help you explore the world with Gapminder.

New and improved Gapminder World
Most new features can be found in Gapminder World, the on-line graph that displays the development for for over 200 countries and territories for a large number of indicators.

We have made it much easier to find interesting stories in the vast amount of data. Simply click the “Open graphs menu” button to browse through the list of stories that we found interesting and together with the graph get a short explanation of what the graph is showing.

The list of stories will grow over time and please, feel free to suggest new graphs or comparisons from the data, that you think should be in that list.

You can of course still make your own graph by choosing yourself among the 430 indicators and share that graph with the world, as before.

We also made it a lot easier to share your graph through your blog, web page or e-mail as well as finding the documentation to the statistics we use in Gapminder World.

New Data page makes download of statistics easy
The new Data page lists all the indicators, allowing you to search and download data to excel by just a click of a button. You also have the option to simply view it online or see it in a Gapminder graph.

The data page also contains information about the countries and territories you can see in Gapminder  World and full documentation for the time series that have been compiled by Gapminder, from various sources.

Especially for teachers
To assist teachers and educators in using Gapminder in their education, we have opened a new For Teachers page especially for this group. During the spring we will add tools, resources and examples that we think could be useful in education.

Hans Rosling, founder and director of Gapminder, is one of the world’s “100 most important global thinkers” of 2009, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.

Hans Rosling comments the list on his Twitter-feed: “One of 100 top global thinker, Honored, but instead of #96 I had rather been placed after Valerie Hudson (#97).

Rosling is honored at #96 on the list for “boggling our minds with paradigm-shattering data“. The list is topped by (1) Ben Bernanke, the chairman of US federal reserve for his actions to turn the US-depression and (2) Barack Obama for “for reimagining America’s role in the world.”

Here is what Foreign Policy writes about Hans Rosling:

Rosling, a doctor and global-health professor, has become famous for his energetic lectures, in which he narrates mind-blowing statistics on development and public health — as they literally move across a screen. Imagine x-y axes filled with data points, each representing a country. As time passes, the dots move, realigning to show changes in child mortality, percentage of paved roads, unemployment rates, or pretty much any other metric you can imagine. Rosling’s quest to use numbers to shatter stereotypes of rich and poor countries has brought him global prominence.

Go to the full list…

SADEV, the Swedish Agency for Development Evaluation maintains a database with time series data on Swedish bi- and multilateral aid allocation. The task to make sense of the development aid data is a difficult one.

Which countries have received most, which sectors are biggest, and how much within a country went to different sectors, such as education or health? You also want to I know see how much aid was distributed through the different multilateral organizations.

To get things started Gapminder put the data from Sadev into a few different visualization tools.

See the result in Gapminder Labs Visualizing Swedish development aid

At TEDIndia, the first ever TED-conference in Asia, Hans Rosling spoke about the rise of Asia and showed how the region has developed over the last 150 years.

» See video here