Our World in Data

Type of business	Non-profit affiliated with theUniversity of Oxford
Headquarters	Oxford, England
Owner	Global Change Data Lab
Founder	Max Roser
Revenue	£2,450,820 (2023)[1]
URL	ourworldindata.org
Commercial	No
Launched	May 2013 (12 years ago) (2013-05)[2]
Current status	Active

Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientificonline publication that focuses on largeglobal problems such aspoverty,disease,hunger,war,climate change,population growth,existential risks, andinequality.

It is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, aregistered charity in England and Wales,^[3] and was founded byMax Roser, a socialhistorian and development economist. The research team is based at theUniversity of Oxford.^[4] The organization is chaired byHetan Shah.

Our World in Data uses interactive charts and maps to illustrate research findings, often taking a long-term view to show how globalliving conditions have changed over time.

• 
  Compilation of graphs from the organization, showing the overall global percentages of the last two centuries, in six factors: extreme poverty, democracy, basic education, vaccination, literacy, and child mortality
• 
  Global CO₂ emissions by world region since 1750

• 
  Cartogram showing the distribution of the global population. Each of the 15,266 pixels represents the home country of 500,000 people.

As of April 2024, Our World in Data categorize their charts and articles by the following topics on their website:^[5]

• Population and Demographic Change
• Health
• Energy and Environment
• Food and Agriculture
• Poverty and Economic Development
• Education and Knowledge
• Innovation and Technological Change
• Living Conditions, Community, and Wellbeing
• Human Rights and Democracy
• Violence and War

Roser began his work on the project in 2011,^[6] adding a research team at theUniversity of Oxford later on. In the first years, Roser developed the publication together with inequality researcher SirTony Atkinson.^[6]Hannah Ritchie joined in 2017 and became Head of Research.^[7]Edouard Mathieu joined in 2020 and became Head of Data.^[8] The organization began theCOVID-19 pandemic with six staff members, and grew to 20 by late 2021.^[9][10]

In 2019, Our World in Data won theLovie Award, a European web award,^[11] and was one of threenonprofit organizations inY Combinator's Winter 2019 cohort.^[12][13]

Beginning in 2020, Our World in Data added an emphasis on publishing global data and research on the COVID-19 pandemic:

• They created and maintained a worldwide database onvaccinations for COVID-19, which was used as the source for data published by theWorld Health Organization,^[14] researchers and other international organizations,^[15][16] journals,^[17] and numerous newspapers.^{[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]}
• Similarly, the team built and maintained a global dataset onCOVID-19 testing which was used by the United Nations, the White House, the World Health Organization, and epidemiologists and researchers,^[27][28][29] and also published data such as hospitalizations and computations of excess deaths.^[30]

In 2021, the team began campaigning for theInternational Energy Agency to make the data it collects from national governments publicly available.^[31]

Global Change Data Lab, the non-profit that publishes Our World in Data and the open-access data tools that make the online publication possible, is funded through a mix of grants, sponsors, and reader donations.^[32]

• The first grant to support the research project was given by theNuffield Foundation, a London-based foundation focused on social policy.^[33]
• Other grantors supporting the project have included the Quadrature Climate Foundation, theBill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a grant from German philanthropistSusanne Klatten.^[34] In the past, Our World in Data has also received grants from theWorld Health Organization, theDepartment of Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom, and theEffective Altruism Meta Fund.^[35]
• Reader donations are also a major source of funding. In 2020, more than 3,000 individuals supported the project,^[36] exceeding 4,000 donors by 2023. The list of donors includesJamie Metzl and YouTuberHank Green.^[35]

The research team collaborated with the science YouTube channelKurzgesagt.^[37][38]

In thecoronavirus pandemic, the team partnered with epidemiologists fromHarvard's Chan School of Public Health and theRobert Koch Institute to study countries that have responded successfully in the early phase of the pandemic.^[39] Janine Aron andJohn Muellbauer worked with OWID to researchexcess mortality during the pandemic.^[40]

In 2022,FTX's Future Fund offered Our World in Data a $7.5 million grant to support their activities. Max Roser told Fortune that Our World in Data's board of trustees ultimately rejected the grant money after conducting due diligence and other checks.^[41]

In 2021, the Our World in Data website had 89 million unique visitors.^[42]

Our World in Data has been cited in academic scientific journals,^{[43][44][45][46][47]} medicine and global health journals,^[48][49] and social science journals.^[50]The Washington Post,The New York Times,^[51] andThe Economist^[52] have used Our World in Data as a source.

The site uses permissive licenses to allow others to copy, modify, and distribute the work (CC BY for content and theMIT License for software).^[53]

• Gapminder Foundation

Wikimedia Commons has media related toOur World in Data.

• Official website
• History of Our World in Data

• Statistical service organizations
• Publications
• Online publishing
• Development economics
• Data and information visualization software
• World population
• Creative Commons-licensed works
• Publications associated with the University of Oxford

• CS1 Spanish-language sources (es)
• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from April 2022
• Pages using gadget owidslider
• Commons category link is on Wikidata