A medical doctor and professor for international health at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, Rosling became famous as the public educator who used statistics to show how the world is changing. He chose this public role after making two significant discoveries.

Rosling’s first discovery was that many people are not aware of even the most basic facts about global health and global development. Through surveys, Rosling found that at a time when poverty is falling faster than ever before, the majority of people think that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty is rising. Similarly, he found that many underestimate global life expectancy widely, and are not aware of the success of delivering healthcare services — for example, vaccines — globally. He found that people’s worldviews often do not have much grounding in facts, even long before the “post-fact” era. Rosling was convinced that this unawareness of global progress matters. He made it his mission to fight this “devastating ignorance” that turns us into cynics, as we falsely believe that global development must be a mirage.

Rosling’s second discovery was that this lack of factual knowledge was not because people are not interested in global development, but because it is too hard for those that want to know about global development to access this knowledge. Neither the experts nor the media were presenting how global development changes the world. Based on these two insights, Hans Rosling made it his mission to bridge this gap and present the evidence that global development is a reality. His approach to communicating research on global development was through public talks and the use of data visualization.