State of Inequality

HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria take their greatest toll on the world’s poorest, least educated and rural populations.

With disaggregated data from 186 countries, the World Health Organization’s ‘State of Inequality’ report contained the insights the world needed to stop overlooking the underserved.

We distilled those insights into a digestible data story, exposing the gaps that show we’ve been leaving the world’s most disadvantaged people behind.

To draw focus to these disparities, we opted for dumbbell plots, literally drawing a line between the most and least privileged across sub-groups like sex, education and economic status. Buttons on each viz let readers toggle between each sub-group, exploring how inequalities shift between the three diseases.

Transparency on our data handling was crucial. Starting with a beeswarm viz containing values from each country, a scrolling animation walked the reader through how we translated a cluster of data points from hundreds of countries into our clearer dumbbell plots.

But we were conscious readers shouldn’t lose sight of the lives behind each data point. So we drew from the rich photography of the WHO image library to put a face to the people confronting these illnesses around the world.