Hans Rosling was a Swedish doctor whose decades of work in public health and education culminated in him becoming something of a TED celebrity after he gave a much lauded talk that dispelled some notions people may have had about the developing world, using unique data projection software that brought the data to life with visual impact. Unfortunately for the world, Rosling succumbed to pancreatic cancer on February 7th, 2017, at the age of 68.

Rosling hails from Uppsala, Sweden, where he was born on July 27th, 1948. After pursuing his initial education in statistics and medicine in his hometown, he made a big move to Bangalore, India to study public health at St. John’s Medical College. His journey into investigative medicine and statistics really began in 1979 though, when he moved to Nacala, Mozambique to serve as a district medical officer. It was here that he heard of an outbreak of Konzo, a paralytic disease that was cropping up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He began studying and documenting the outbreak, and his work led to him being awarded a PHD from the University of Uppsala in 1986. He served as a health advisor to the WHO and UNICEF, and was one of the founders of the Swedish chapter of Doctors without Borders. As chairman of the international research and training committee at the prestigious Karolinska Institute, he started several courses on global health and promoted a fact-based view of global issues, rather than making emotional appeals that weren’t supported by data.

Having spent over twenty years studying outbreaks of Konzo and other diseases among rural populations in Africa, Rosling’s statistician side couldn’t help but notice a correlation between poverty, access to healthcare, nutrition, and sanitation. While this may seem like a common sense observation, there weren’t many efforts being made to gather the data and put it into a format from which actionable conclusions could be drawn. So, being both a doctor and a data geek, Rosling decided to begin crunching the numbers and making presentations.

Rosling illustrating how Ebola spreads

Data is not inherently exciting for most people, a category that includes many politicians, philanthropists, and government bureaucrats who are in a position to make decisions that can help millions of people, or harm them through inaction or misallocation of scarce resources. After his experiences in both Africa and working as an advisor for UNICEF and the WHO, Rosling understood that there was a great need for data visualization software that would help scientists and aid organizations make compelling, fact-based arguments to the aforementioned influential politicians, philanthropists, and bureaucrats. To this end, Rosling started the Gapminder Foundation, whose mission statement was as follows:

“The object of the Foundation shall be to promote sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at the local, national and global levels.”

Further elaboration on these points can be found on their website

Gapminder measures ignorance about the world

Gapminder makes global data easy to use and understand

Gapminder promotes Factfulness, a new way of thinking

Gapminder collaborates with educators across the world

2006 Gapminder Software in Action

How do you make data more interesting? You create software that stimulates and engages the audience by making it vibrant and colorful, easily differentiating the data points, and you show how it changes over time in relation to other data. It’s easier to see it yourself than for me to explain how Gapminder accomplishes this. Go here, set the slider to 1800, and then press play. You'll see how average income and life expectancy has changed for many countries over the past 216 years. It seems simple, but previously you would need numerous charts and a whole lot of powerpoint slides to communicate the same information, and powerpoint presentations are how you put people to sleep. The software that Rosling oversaw the development of is called Trendalyzer, and it was acquired by Google in 2006. It’s since been incorporated into Google’s overall suite of graphical data presentation products.

Why was this such a big contribution? Awareness. Hans Rosling has made millions of people who are in a position to make a difference better informed when it comes to making decisions. Whether they’re a donor, an activist, a bureaucrat, an NGO advocate, or simply a concerned citizen, they’re now in a better position than they were before to come to informed conclusions and act on them. By creating a method in which important data could be conveyed visually to audiences, their understanding and appreciation of the data was far more permanent than it would have been if you spent an hour running through 200 slides. In these short but intense presentations, massive amounts of information are easily digested by the audience, giving them far more time to contemplate the important question of how they wanted to act on the information. The Trendalyzer software developed by Hans Rosling has become an important tool in slowly changing the perception of the developing world from an emotional and opinionated one, to a fact-driven view that leads scientists and influential members of international aid organizations to better focus their efforts to where they’re most needed. When people have the right data, and are able to quickly visualize it, they can spend their time on analyzing it, generating solutions, and acting on those solutions. Much of the guesswork is removed, meaning that the solutions implemented stand a better chance of having a positive outcome.

Inspiration for Humaniq came from many places, and Hans Rosling’s work with Gapminder in particular jarred our consciences, galvanizing us to take action, rather than simply discuss solving problems with wealth and health inequality between rich nations and poor nations. In particular, this chart , which shows how average income and life expectancy has grown over time, visualizes the remaining gap between developing countries and those which are already developed. In the coming age of automation it’s not feasible for these countries to pull themselves up through industrial revolution, with the pollution and social upheaval that comes with it. Our solution is to increase bottom-up economic activity by creating a new financial ecosystem that provides access to financial services for even the poorest of people. Humaniq, along with many other companies, NGOs, philanthropic organizations, and government agencies, have benefitted from the great work of Hans Rosling. So we’d like to say farewell Dr. Rosling, you’ll be missed but your work will inspire for decades to come.

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