World Bank Dataviz

How People Use Mobile Phones in Emerging Markets in Asia

Social media apps are the most commonly used mobile apps in emerging countries in Asia, according to a survey conducted by Jana, a Boston-based mobile technology company. For example, 87% of respondents in Indonesia have social media apps on their mobile phones. The second most common mobile apps are games. 

Jana surveyed over 3000 people in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam to find out how mobile phones are being used. Explore the results in their interactive infographic.

Calculating the World’s Population

How do demographers actually know how many people live on Earth? Can they accurately calculate the number of people that have ever lived? You asked our data help desk these questions, and our open data whiz drew the answers in this video.

Do you have more questions about how data is calculated? Ask them via our data help desk or on Twitter with hashtag #dataquestion

Where the Poorest Girls Do Not Finish Primary School

Did you know that 98% of the poorest young women in Niger, a landlocked country in Western Africa, have not completed primary school? (Note: 2006 data)

Niger is not alone. “In at least 10 countries in the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), 9 out of 10 of the poorest women aged 15 to 24-years haven’t completed primary school, compared with 8 out of 10 young men.“

Click through the full interactive feature  to learn about the level of gender equality in primary school in selected countries. 

Source: World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE)

Visualizing Global Internet Use

Does Educating Girls Reduce Fertility Rates?

What is the relationship between fertility rates (the average number of births per woman) and female education?

This visualization of our World Development Indicators shows that the higher the level of female education, the lower the fertility rate.

For example, in 1991, 57% of girls completed primary school in Ghana and the fertility rate was 5.5. Twenty years later, in 2011, 91% of girls completed primary school and the fertility rate was 4.1. 

Explore the bubble chart below to find out the relationship between fertility rates and female education in your country. 

Source: World Development Indicators

How Many Adults use Mobile Money in Sub-Saharan Africa?

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where traditional banking has been hampered by transportation and other infrastructure problems, mobile banking has expanded to 16% of the market, according to the Global Findex, a global financial inclusion database that measures the use of financial services and identifies the unbanked, who experience the greatest barriers to access.

Check out the chart below to see what percentage of adults in these countries reported using a mobile phone for money transactions.

Get the data from the Global Findex.  

Source: Global Findex 

How Much Do People in Different Countries Spend on Food?

Generally, as countries develop, people spend proportionally less of their household budget on food, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data. 

The Economist visualized this dataset to show how much people in selected countries spend on food per week. 

Source: The Economist

How the World Uses Freshwater

Today is World Water Day. Did you know 70% of freshwater is used for irrigation, 22% for industry and 8% for domestic use?

Water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UN-Water.

Source: UN-Water.org

Visualizing the Relationship Between Internet Usage and GDP per capita

As a country’s GDP per capita increases, how do internet penetration rates change?

Ramiro Gómez, a Berlin based freelance software developer created a data visualization to show the percentage of Internet users in relation to the GDP per capita for countries from 1990 to 2011.

Get the data from the World Development Indicators. 

Source: Visual.ly

Temperature Change by 2100

In 2012, we warned that the world temperature is on track to increase 4°C by 2100 without concerted, global action to fight climate change

How hot might your country get by 2100? Find out in the map below, or click here for the full interactive feature: http://bit.ly/ZwXhKY

This map is based on the assumption that the world population may peak mid-century and decline thereafter. It also assumes rapid changes in economic structures and the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies.

Source: Climate Change Knowledge Portal