On June 25-26, Swedish academic and statistician – Hans Rosling visited Georgia to deliver two public lectures at Radisson Blu Iveria for the Georgian Parliament, government, civil society, academia and students.
Hans Rosling is a co-founder and the chairman of the Gapminder Foundation. His experience includes being the health adviser to WHO, UNICEF and several aid agencies. In 1993, he was one of the initiators of Mйdecins Sans Frontiиres in Sweden.
Rosling is frequently invited to the TED Talks, one of the most famous and prestigious international conferences where Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Larry Page and others have given speeches. In 2009 Rosling was listed as one of 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine and in 2012 he was elected as member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. The same year TIME magazine featured Rosling in its 100 most influential people list.
Rosling’s presentations are grounded on solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. Rosling’s documentary films on public health, population and development have been aired on BBC.
In Tbilisi, the public lecture focused on the importance of investing in development of young people for ensuring the country’s sustainable development. These lectures provided a forum for policy makers from different sectors, professionals, students and other interested parties to visualize the evidences and experience and reflect them in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs related to population and development.
A significant part of the lecture was dedicated to family planning and gender equality. Rosling named gender inequality as one of the main hindrances to development of the modern society “women in Georgia receive as many years of education as in Germany, however their income is low and the economy is poor.” In addition to that the number of abortions is almost half of the fertility and the contraception prevalence rate is low. Rosling also spoke about reproductive health education as a key indicator to development. He gave an example of fatherhood from his personal experience and encouraged the men in the audience to increase their involvement in family matters.
When talking about the geopolitics and global economy, Rosling asserted that currently Georgia looks at the West and sometimes feels remote, however statistical projections related to population dynamics reveal that by the end of this century, when 80% of the world’s population will live in Asia and Africa, Georgia will become a border of Europe to the East and will be an important part of the “reverse-Silk Road.”
The event was organized by the United Nations Population Fund in Georgia and the Georgian Parliament’s Gender Equality Council within the framework of UN Joint Programme “To Enhance Gender Equality in Georgia” through generous support from the Swedish Government.
