The United Nations (UN) Statistics Division celebrated World Statistics Day on October 20, 2015, and hosted a data visualization competition to help provide insights about the information in its Millennium Development Goals database, which houses data about the UN’s efforts to combat extreme poverty and improve quality of life. The winning visualization, created by French graphic designer Jeremy Boy, is called “Is the world a better place today?” (isWBPT) and provides users an interactive look at progress toward specific Millennium Development Goals for individual countries and regions. For each goal, isWBPT plots historical progress and trend lines to allow users to estimate the likelihood of achieving a particular goal in a country and encourages users to identify relationships in the data that could help inform more effective policies.
Visualizing Progress to a Better World
