Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling is professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, the medical university in Stockholm, Sweden. When working as a young doctor in Mozambique he discovered a formerly unrecognized paralytic disease that his research team named konzo. His 20 years of research on global health concerned the character of the links between economy and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

He has been adviser to WHO and UNICEF, co-founded Médecines sans Frontiers in Sweden and started new courses and published a textbook on Global Health. He is member of the International Group of the Swedish Academy of Science and of the Global Agenda Network of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

He co-founded Gapminder Foundation (www.gapminder.org) with son and daughter-in-law. Gapminder promotes a fact based world view by converting the international statistics into moving, interactive, understandable and enjoyable graphics. This was first done by developing the Trendalyzer software that Google acquired in 2007.

Using animations of global trends Hans Rosling lectures about past and contemporary economic, social and environmental changes in the world and he produces thematic videos using the same technique. His award-winning lectures on global trends have been labeled “humorous, yet deadly serious” and many in the audience have found their own world view to be some decades too old.

His 5 points on the global changes are

1. There are no longer two types of countries in the world, the old division into industrialized and developing countries has been replaced by 192 countries on a continuum of socio-economic development.
2. Many Asian countries are now improving twice as fast as Europe ever did.
3. A new gap may form between 5 billion people moving towards healthy lives with cell phones, washing machines and health service and more than 1 billion people stuck in the vicious circle of absolute poverty and disease.

4. So far all progress towards health and wealth has been achieved at the prize of increased CO₂ emission and an eminent climate crisis.

5. There are reasons for optimism regarding the future of the world because the world is so poorly governed at present. Hence we have enormous opportunities to improve the life of all humans by turning our already converging world into an equal, secure, sustainable and free place to live in.