Fun fact: the World Bank makes gobs of data available on their website. Want to know how many square kilometers of forest cover the earth? Check out the World Bank. What about the proportion of seats held by women in parliaments? Again, the World Bank. Even more fun is sifting through that data trying to interpret and extrapolate relationships from it.
Fortunately, davidbauer over at visualizing.org enjoy sifting through that data and go a step further to translate that information graphically. The result: an interactive map showing a country's number of migrants abroad and the amount received from each country. It also compares the amount of remittances with international aid money over time. It's great for us here at the Building Roots Project because it gives us an idea of where a target country's population and migrant resources are located. With the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger, we can look up data from the past 50 years on almost any country.
Try it out!
This incredible graphic was forwarded to me from Richard Reiss, cofounder of Artist As Citizen and City Atlas. Richard was a speaker at a recent panel on non-profit leadership and is a wealth of knowledge about all things design, art, and non-profit-related.