About
Who we are
Our World in Data (OWID) is a free, non-profit website. Our mission is to increase understanding of the world’s largest problems and drive informed action to solve them (more on our mission below).
OWID 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, which 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.
Learn more about our team and funding, and find answers to common questions in our FAQs.
What we do and how to follow our work
We bring together high-quality data on more than 120 topics, such as poverty, CO₂ emissions and climate change, migration, democracy, global health, population growth, armed conflicts, artificial intelligence, and more.
Our researchers and data scientists help you understand these topics better, making data visualizations and writing explanations that describe the data, what it shows, and why it matters.
We present our work in three main formats: longer narrative articles, bite-sized data insights, and individual topic pages.
We make it easy to explore our data in over 14,000 interactive charts and data tools that gather many indicators to give comprehensive overviews of topics. You can even embed our interactive charts in any website. All of these charts are free to reuse under our permissive Creative Commons license.
We’ve also made it easy to download and reuse the data (though note that most of this data comes from third-party providers such as the WHO, UN, and World Bank and is subject to their license terms).
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:
Learn more in these key articles
How to contact us
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.