Don’t Panic: How To End Poverty in 15 Years

Episode
Don’t Panic - The Truth About Population
Broadcast Info
2015 (59 mins)
Description
With the world’s population at 7 billion and still growing we often look at the future with dread. In ‘Don’t Panic - The Truth About Population’, world famous Swedish statistical showman Hans Rosling presents a different view. This "as live" event featuring cutting edge 3D infographics paints a vivid picture of a world that has changed in ways we barely understand - often for the better.

We face huge challenges in terms of food, resources and climate change but at the heart of Professor Rosling’s entertaining and exuberant statistical tour-de-force is the message that the world of tomorrow is a much better place than we might imagine. Rosling reveals that the global challenge of rapid population growth, the socalled population explosion, has already been overcome. In just fifty years the average number of children born per woman has plummeted from 5 to just 2.5 and is still falling fast. Projections for a few generations’ time show world population growth levelling off completely. Yet in what Rosling calls his ‘Great British Ignorance Survey’ he discovers that people’s perceptions of the world are often decades out of date.

In Bangladesh - a country once famously described as a ‘basket-case’ - families of two children are now the norm. We meet Taslima Khan who travels through rural villages dispensing contraceptives and advice on how to deal with difficult husbands. Deep in rural Mozambique - one of the poorest countries in the world - we meet subsistence farmers Andre and Olivia who’ve been saving for two years to buy a piece of lifetransforming technology - a bicycle. Now everything depends on their sesame harvest. Will they manage to pedal their way out of poverty onceand-for-all? Globally the proportion of people in extreme poverty is the lowest ever, and now the UN is setting itself the goal of eradicating extreme poverty completely within the next twenty years.

Professor Rosling’s previous BBC show ‘The Joy of Stats’ won a Grierson Award and he’s one of ‘Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World’, not to mention being the current reigning ‘International Swede of the Year’! ‘Don’t Panic - the Truth about Population’ is his most ambitious and entertaining show ever.
Genre
Development; Economics; International Development; Medicine; Nutrition; Statistics

How to cite this record

The Open University, "Don’t Panic: How To End Poverty in 15 Years". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/220020 (Accessed 09 Jan 2025)