About
Our mission
Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: the world faces many great and terrifying problems. It is these large problems that our work at Our World in Data focuses on.
Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers around the world who dedicate their lives to it, we often have a good understanding of how it is possible to make progress against the large problems we are facing. The world has the resources to do much better and reduce suffering.
We believe that a key reason why we fail to achieve the progress we are capable of is that we do not make enough use of this existing research and data: the important knowledge is often stored in inaccessible databases, locked away behind paywalls, and buried under jargon in academic papers.
The goal of our work is to make this knowledge accessible and understandable to empower those working to build a better world. As we say on our homepage, Our World in Data’s mission is to publish the ”research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.”
Read more from our founder, Max Roser, about our mission and why we believe research and data are crucial to building a better future:
More about our mission
Why do we need to know about progress if we are concerned about the world's largest problems?
Why have we made it our mission to publish “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems”?
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible.
The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics
The world is huge; to get a clear idea of what our world is like, we have to rely on carefully collected, well documented statistics.
Oxford Partnership
Our World in Data is produced as a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Oxford, who are the scientific contributors of the website content; and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab, who owns, publishes and maintains the website and the data tools.
At the University of Oxford, the research team is affiliated with the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, where the mission is to produce academic research on the world’s largest problems based on the empirical analysis of global data.
The Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development
The Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development is dedicated to the study of large global problems, including poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, existential risks, inequality, and war.
Contact
You can always contact us at info@ourworldindata.org or fill out our Feedback form. If you have a question, you may find an answer in our Frequently asked questions. There we answer questions about copyright, citing our work, translating our work, our visualization software, and more.