“Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them,” said Gapminder Foundation Director Hans Rosling at a discussion hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on May 26, 2009. In his spirited and often humorous remarks, Rosling praised the 25-year-old Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Macro International, Inc., as “public-private partnership at its best.” The DHS program works with countries’ health ministries to collect data on family planning, child and maternal health, disease prevalence, and other health indicators, and makes the data freely available for public use.

The Beauty Behind the Data

Rosling uses Gapminder’s signature “moving bubble” Trendalyzer software—which Google purchased and made available as “Motion Chart”—to graphically demonstrate global health, economic, and environmental trends. Gapminder uses data from several sources, including DHS surveys, to generate its illuminating displays.

“Sweden, during the last hundred years, didn’t achieve [the] Millennium Development Goal rate” for yearly reductions in child mortality, Rosling explained. “We are putting goals for Tanzania, Bangladesh that [were] never…achieved by any country in West Europe or North America.” The remarkable thing, said Rosling, is that many low-income countries are achieving or even surpassing these demanding targets.

Free Access, Unified Formatting Are Top Priorities

Rosling stressed that access to data must be free, and admonished the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and others who charge for their statistics. “They say, ‘No, we can’t give the data to the people because they will make wrong comparisons, and they will make wrong conclusions,’” Rosling continued, “and I say ‘Yes, we call it freedom.’”

Rosling cautioned against “database-hugging disorder,” or statisticians’ tendency to guard their data because of concerns about budgets or misinterpretation. A better approach, he insisted, is to embrace innovations like the Creative Commons license, which encourages sharing information by offering a range of easy-to-understand legal protections and freedoms for creative works, data, and information.

In addition, “we don’t have a unified format for data,” Rosling said, and “that’s why the transaction costs are so enormously high, and that’s why those who put data together in unified format charge for it.” He cited YouTube as an excellent medium for broadening public distribution of data. To the audience’s delight, a live Google search for “sex, money, and health” returned a YouTube clip of one of his own presentations as its top hit.

Improving Lives With Data

“The worst environmental problem today is that two million children die of diarrhea [each year], and that billions of people drink their neighbors’ lukewarm feces,” said Rosling, and yet “water and sanitation data is very, very weak.” Collecting information from remote areas—often the most impoverished—is difficult. Measuring access to potable water is complicated because it requires community-based calculations, which do not fit into DHS’ household-centric methodology.

Rosling called upon young adults to work to “eradicate unnecessary disease and poverty in the world.” He also advocated improved post-graduate training in statistics, particularly in low-income countries.

Better statistical data will foment more effective solutions to development challenges—provided there are ambassadors like Rosling willing and able to unveil the beauty behind the numbers.

Photo: Hans Rosling. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) officially launched its 2008 World Population Data Sheet yesterday at the National Press Club. The 2008 Data Sheet features key population, health, environmental, and economic indicators for more than 200 countries. New in this year’s edition, co-authored by Carl Haub and Mary Mederios Kent, are data on percent of population in urban areas, number of vehicles per 100,000 people, and percent of population with access to improved drinking water.

Several findings highlight the significant health inequalities between wealthy and poor countries. For example, while around 1 in 6,000 women in developed countries dies from pregnancy-related causes, in the 50 least-developed countries, the risk is an astonishing 1 in 22. Because maternal mortality is generally seen as a proxy for the general state of a country’s health care system, these statistics point to alarming systemic health care failings in many of the world’s least-developed countries.

The 2008 World Population Data Sheet also highlights disparities between developed and developing countries in population growth rate trends; as wealthier countries’ populations stagnate or even begin to decline, the populations of the world’s poorest countries continue to grow at a rapid clip. PRB president Bill Butz noted that “[n]early all of the world population growth is now concentrated in the world’s poorer countries,” and that “[e]ven the small amount of overall growth in the wealthier nations will largely result from immigration.” As Kent pointed out at yesterday’s press conference, the United States is the major exception to this trend, because most of its population growth over the next several decades will come from natural increase.

Unfortunately, the countries with the least access to improved water sources—and therefore some of the highest rates of diarrheal disease and child malnutrition—have among the world’s fastest-growing populations. For instance, in Ethiopia, which has a total fertility rate of 5.3 births per woman, only 42 percent of the population has access to an improved water source, and in Afghanistan, which has a total fertility rate of 6.8, the figure is a mere 22 percent.