Yesterday is Blog Action day and tons of bloggers posted about single topic – poverty. It is a topic very close to my heart for various reasons. It is a very sad thing not to have food or shelter or healthy living conditions. But man has thrived in all those situations just because he learned how to become better. In my opinion lack of knowledge is much more serious than lack of food. That is one reason why even the poorest parents in the world would love to see their kids going to school, so that they can learn and become better. I want to sensitize my readers about this issue: the new poor – people without information.. Internet penetration can be considered as one parameter to measure information hunger in the world. So I spent sometime yesterday gathering the data about this and created a heat map.
Mapping Internet Penetration Rates in World Countries
I took the data about internet penetration from Internet World Stats and used this in the World heat map excel that my friend Robert (of Excel Dashboards fame) once shared with me to create a map like this:

Download the excel file with the map of world internet penetration rates
Darker countries have less internet penetration. Sadly this map correlates highly with a world poverty map. I guess attacking the information access issues can eventually solve the poverty.
Also checkout Nathan’s visualization on poverty rates in US

















9 Responses to “CP044: My first dashboard was a failure!!!”
CONGRATS on the book!
Thanks for this podcast. It's great to hear about your disaster and recovery. It's a reminder that we're all human. None of this skill came easily.
Thank you Oz. I believe that we learn most by analyzing our mistakes.
Hey chandoo
this really a good lesson learned
but as I have already stated in one of my previous email that it would be more helpful for us if you could release videos of your classes for us
thanks
The article gave me motivation, especially you describing the terrible disaster that you faced but how to get back from the setbacks. Thanks for that, but with video this will be more fun.
Hi Nafi,
Thanks for your comments. Please note that this is (and will be) audio podcast. For videos, I suggest subscribing to our YouTube channel. No point listening to audio and saying its not video.
You always motivate me with respect of the tools in excel. How we can really exploit it to the fullest. Thanks very much
Thank you Amankwah... 🙂
Thank you very much, Chandoo, for your excellent lessons, I am anxious to learn so valuable tips and tricks from you, keep up the great job!
I truly appreciate the transcripts of the podcasts, because as a speaker of English as a second language, it allows me to fully understand the material. It'd be great if you can add transcripts to your online courses too, I am sure people will welcome this feature.
Dashboards for Excel has arrived in Laguna Beach, CA! Thanks!
Now I need to make time to "learn and inwardly digest" its contents as one of my high school teachers would admonish us!