Genève
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Discours prononcé en anglais. Texte original, non traduit.
Mister Director-General, Mister President of Gapminder foundation, Ladies and gentlemen
Hans Rosling was a champion of statistics and as such, a great enlightener.
But he was more than that: He was an eminent evolutionary theorist.
Until Rosling, we were convinced that humans descended from apes.
But then came Rosling. He gave a knowledge test to chimpanzees. And it turned out: In a multiple-choice test they get better results than humans.
So: Statistically speaking, chimpanzees know much more about the world than we humans do.
Ever since, we have been wondering: Was Darwin perhaps mistaken? Was it not apes that descended from humans? Was it the other way round?
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, Rosling: In any case, the fourth blow to the narcissism of humanity is by far the worst.
Of course, this puts pressure on me as a representative of the human race.
As a politician, one normally thinks: How can I be more convincing than another politician? But when speaking about Hans Rosling, you automatically ask yourself: What am I even doing here? Wouldn’t a chimpanzee give a much better speech anyway??
But seriously ladies and gentlemen,
Hans Rosling showed us just how wrong we were in many of our assumptions about how the world works.
He showed us, that our mindset and the data set are worlds apart and that we have to keep checking our narratives for their reality content.
He also exposed the institutions of world knowledge: Governments that fail to make use of their data. Schools that work with outdated data. The media that tend to focus on bad news and re-inforce our own tendency to always see the negative side of things.
Distorted images and clichés shape our world view more than ‘facts and figures’.
And so the foundations on which we make political and economic decisions are fragile.
The good news is that: We can do better. And indeed – in view of the massive challenges of our century – we must do better.
Ladies and gentlemen
The 2021 UN World Data Forum was an important milestone on the Road to Bern, a Swiss initiative, that aims to convince experts, but also a broader public, to foster statistical, fact-based thinking.
Especially when it comes to the ambitious 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, progress can only be made if we have robust data at our disposal.
That is true of the fight against poverty and famine just as it is for efforts on gender equality, global public health – and, not least, the decisive matter of climate change.
Ladies and gentlemen
It is no coincidence that the first Project Rosling event that Switzerland is co-organising with the World Health Organisation is taking place here in international Geneva, where 39 international organisations and 432 NGOs accumulate immense volumes of data that can help us to improve our analyses and decision making.
Project Rosling invites you all to make use of this wealth of data.
It is not possible to say whether we will achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. That is a question of political will.
But there is one thing we do know: If we really do want to achieve those goals, we can only do so on the basis of solid facts.
On that note, I hope you have some insightful discussions.
Let’s show those chimpanzees!
Thank you.