By Joanna Moore
To solve the issues of poverty and inequality, we must first understand them. And to address these problems globally, we must consider the cultural differences of them as well. It’s hard. It’s not feasible to travel all over the world and find people to share their day to day lives. Luckily, Swedish foundation Gapminder has done the legwork for you.
The politically, religiously, and economically neutral foundation built the platform Dollar Street as a tool to understand what different income levels and means of living look like all over the world. Visualizing the world as one street, with the poorest on the left, the richest on the right, and everyone else in between, Dollar Street aims to tackle the complexities and nuances of poverty and income with simplicity.
Founder Anna Rosling Rönnlund spent her career harnessing public data and making it easy to understand. She realized that no matter how interactive and colorful your graphs and charts were, they would never accurately illustrate the reality or complexity of a family or a community. So, she used pictures as data, and collected photos of up to 135 household items in each of the 254 homes they visited in fifty countries. She asked each family what they liked about where they live, and what their next big step would be. Based off of disposable income per adult, adjusting for children and PPP, she lined them all up on Dollar Street.
When you visit the website, you are immediately greeted with pictures of families at varying income levels in varying places lined up across the page. At the top of the page there is a street, showing the distribution of income, and you can slide it to filter through certain income ranges. You can sort families by country, but you can also sort by item. You can learn about families in Russia, but you can also see shoes in South Africa, or vegetables in the United States. There are so many combinations to sort through, and each belongs to a unique narrative. It is easy to spend hours clicking through photos and stories, and they are each powerful in their own way.
Dollar Street fights the misconception that people who live in poverty choose to do so, or that they do not desire upward mobility, so we should not interfere. The photographers’ “favorites” most often capture items of sentimental value like photo albums or books. By humanizing people who may seem “foreign” or “scary,” we can see that all people are striving for more and want a better life — no matter what a better life looks like to them.
The website has been extremely well received and praised alongside Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and the content is completely free to use and share. To coincide with the company’s mission, Dollar Street is always open to suggestions for additional content. They encourage people to consume their work in whatever way is productive to them. As Gapminder expands their platform, it will be interesting to see if they can maintain their mission to accurately portray diverse ways of life without bias.
