Anna Rosling Rönnlund

About Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Together with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded Gapminder in 2005. Gapminder’s mission statement is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand.

She designed the user-interface of the famous animating bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, used by millions of students across the world, to understand global development trends. The tool was acquired by Google, and Anna worked at Google in Mountain View, CA as a Senior Usability Designer 2007 to 2010. At Google Anna improved search results for public data, developed data exploration tools for Public Data and made a bubble tool gadget (Motion chart) in Google Spreadsheets. In 2010 Anna came back to Gapminder to develop new free teaching material. Anna is now Vice President and Head of Design & User Experience at Gapminder. She also sits in Gapminder’s Board. Anna holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Photography.

Anna founded Dollar Street, the biggest systematic image bank with representative home documentations based on data. At the moment we have almost 30 000 photos and 10 000 video clips, which are free to use under Creative Common license.

Together with Ola and Hans, Anna wrote the Factfulness book, launched in April 2018.

Why Gapminder Exists

Gapminder exists to prevent idiotic global strategies, created based on stereotypical and outdated views of the world, which in some cases might have been right 70 years ago. But the world constantly changes and, today, the world is more developed than ever before, with extensive global collaborations and institutions. And never before have we had access to more data to learn from! Globally, with the evidence at hand, we should be able to drive sustainable progress, tackle global challenges and prevent the major global crises. We need and should be able to collaborate internationally to:

• Prevent wars;
• Prevent pandemics;
• Prevent climate crisis;
• Help people out of extreme poverty;

But in the world today, none of this is done successfully! Why? Part of the reason is that people are generally WRONG about the world. We are lacking a coherent fact-based overview of global proportions and trends to guide global priorities. People don’t have the time or the means to stay up to date with the latest annual reports. Most policy debates are going on without basic factual understanding, and instead, many times ignorance is driving the global agenda.

When stereotypes and outdated facts are driving our decisions, we can’t make the right ones. The world could look very different, if we understood it better! The issue is – most people are not even aware they are wrong, so they can’t change. We at Gapminder know this, as we have extensively tested people’s knowledge and found that people are systematically and devastatingly wrong about lots of crucial global trends and proportions.

This is an exciting problem because it seems very solvable and solving it would have enormous long-term impact. Like the visionaries who imagined that all children should learn to read and write, Gapminder is envisioning a world where all people are aware of their misconceptions and instead use facts to understand the world, which would enable an endless amount of smarter decisions for sustainable global development. People aren’t trying to make bad decisions. They just aren’t equipped with the habits to question their assumptions and the tools to do it quickly and often. Gapminder exists to provide that. By extensive knowledge testing, we identify systematic misconceptions and build free tools for anyone to become aware of and rid themselves of the common misconceptions, and acquire skills to maintain a fact-based worldview and ultimately make fact-based decisions.