Statutes of the Gapminder Foundation
Adopted by deed of 25 February 2005
Article 1
The name of the Foundation shall be the Gapminder Foundation. It shall be an operating foundation based in Stockholm, Stockholm County.
Article 2
The object of the Foundation shall be to promote sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.
Article 3
The object of the foundation shall be achieved by:
(1) use and development of information technology for easily understandable visualization of statistics and other information;
(2) ownership, protection and free dissemination of the development results;
(3) use, together with various cooperation partners, of the development results with a view to making statistics and other information about development available and understandable to broad user groups via the Internet and other media.
Article 4
The Foundation shall not have any religious or political affiliation.
Article 5
The activities of the Foundation shall be financed by contributions from national and international organizations that wish to promote free and independent access to broad user groups to easily understandable information about global, national and local development.
The foundation shall, in addition, seek to raise revenue for its activities by making use of its development results and expertise to sell services and licenses related to the development results.
The Foundation shall have the right to own stocks and shares in commercial limited companies and other legal persons with a view to using the Foundation’s development results and expertise and raising revenue for the Foundation.
Article 6
The affairs of the Foundation shall be managed by a Board composed of not less than five nor more than seven members which shall elect a chair from among its members. One of the Board members shall be elected by the founders for as long as any of them are still alive. The other Board members shall be elected by the Board. Members should have experience of international development cooperation, research and provision of free and independent information and statistics in various ways.
The first Board shall consist of:
Ambassador Gun-Britt Andersson, Paris
Professor Christer Gunnarsson, Lund University
Professor Bo Sundgren, Stockholm School of Economics
Professor Hans Rosling, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
Professor Hans Wigzell, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
Article 7
The Board shall be responsible for keeping accounts, preparing a budget for each financial yea and preparing annual accounts after the end of the year in accordance with the provisions of the Foundations Act. The financial year shall coincide with the calendar year and the annual accounts shall be prepared by 30 April each year.
Article 8
The Board shall meet at least twice a year when convened by the Chair or at the request of at least one of its members.
The Board shall, at a meeting held not later than 30 April each year, adopt an annual report together with an income statement and balance sheet for the past year.
The Board shall, at the meeting held during the period September-December, adopt an operational plan and a budget for the coming year.
Article 9
The Board’s management shall be reviewed by at least one authorized public accountant.
Article 10
The Board may take decisions relating to acquisition, sale and mortgaging of real property and to raising of loans. The Foundation’s assets shall be made interest-bearing by prudent means.
Article 11
These statutes may be amended by the Board of the Foundation in accordance with chapter 6, section 1 of the Foundations Act (SFS 1994:1220).
I, undersigned, hereby certify that this is a true translation of the original Swedish document.
Robert F Crofts, 30 March 2006
Certified Public Translator from Swedish into English and from English into Swedish accredited by the Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency.