Please help us find homes in your country! We need help in finding homes in countries that are not yet portrayed on Dollar Street, and in adding more homes from the countries we already have! We need support with lot of other things as well. If you want to help, please open the form below and fill it out so we can get an idea of how we can best work together! It shouldn't take more than a minute. Thanks!
If you want to do a home right away, here is the step-by-step guide: gapm.io/ds_guide
About Dollar Street
Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. Everyone lives somewhere on the street. The poorest lives to the left and the richest to the right. Everybody else live somewhere in between. Welcome to visit all homes on Dollar Street!
Background
Dollar Street was invented by Anna Rosling Rönnlund at Gapminder. For 15 years she spent her workdays making global public data easier to understand and use. Over time her frustration grew: carefully selecting data to present it in colorful and moving charts made overall global trends and patterns easier to understand. But it did not make everyday life on different income levels understandable. Especially not in places far from home. “People in other cultures are often portrayed as scary or exotic.” Anna explains: “This has to change. We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels. Dollar Street lets you visit many, many homes all over the world. Without travelling.”
Also watch:
TEDxStockholm: Using photos as data to
understand how people live
&
TEDxRiga: Aha! Now I get how everybody
lives
A team of photographers have documented over 264 homes in 50 countries so far, and the list is growing. In each home the photographer spends a day taking photos of up to 135 objects, like the family's toothbrushes or favorite pair of shoes. All photos are then tagged (household function, family name and income).
Dollar Street is developed by Gapminder. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. We fight devastating misconceptions about global development with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. We produce free teaching-resources based on reliable statistics. We collaborate with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations. Read more about Gapminder here.
How can I use Dollar Street?
Dollar Street has no political or financial agenda. Licensed by Creative Commons license 4.0, you are free to reuse, edit and share the images. We hope you will enjoy it!
Frequently Asked Questions
If you have a question, maybe it's already answered in our FAQ.
Media
Need more resources? Check out our press kit below.
Awards
Fast
Company World Changing Ideas Award (2017) – Category Photography and Visualization
InnovateAfrica
(2017)
Brewhouse Award
(2015)
- Category Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship
How were the $ values calculated?
The houses are lined up on the street according to their income. Our method for calculating the income of each family tries to measure consumption rather than salary or income, although the data from the families does not always allow this. This means that if a family grow all the rice they eat each month, then the value of this rice will be included in the total consumption of the home.
The "dollars per month" assigned to each home refer to the consumption available to each adult in the family. This means that we take the total consumption and divide it with something called “adult equivalents”, accounting for the fact that young children consume less. Lastly, we measure the value of the consumption in US dollars. Since the cost of living can vary a lot between countries, we use dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
Contact
If you have any questions that were not answered above, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].