Episode #8 Alexander Betts and Ola Rosling

The IKEA Foundation Podcast

Episode Introduction

Alexander Betts, Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs at the University of Oxford, and Ola Rosling, CEO of Gapminder, discuss what (almost) everybody gets wrong about refugees in this episode hosted by IKEA Foundation CEO Per Heggenes.

There are a lot of misconceptions about refugees, especially around their intentions and why they leave their homes, belongings and loved ones to venture into the unknown. Do you think you know your facts about refugees? Learn more from two interesting and knowledgeable guests who shine a light on some of the issues faced by the world’s 26 million refugees.

Guests Bio

Ola Rosling is President and Co-Founder of Gapminder Foundation, which he founded together with his wife and his father. Since 1999, Ola has led the development of the Trendalyzer software, which was acquired by Google in 2007. At Google Ola and his team delivered the Motion Chart as part of Google Spreadsheets. As Product Manager for Google Public Data, Ola then helped democratise access to public statistics by developing the infrastructure needed to make official statistics part of Google Search results. Ola and Anna went back to Gapminder in 2011 to develop free teaching materials for a fact-based worldview. In 2014, Ola coined the term “Factfulness”, which Gapminder is now promoting to make education about Sustainable Development less ideological and more fact-based.

Together with Anna and Hans, Ola wrote Factfulness, a book launched in April 2018.
Twitter handle: @OlaRosling
Alexander Betts is Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, William Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, and Associate Head of the Social Sciences Division, at the University of Oxford. He served as Director of the Refugee Studies Centre between 2014 and 2017. His research focuses on the politics and economics of refugee assistance. He is co-author, with Paul Collier, of Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System (Penguin Allen Lane), which was named by the Economist as one of the “Best Books of 2017”. He is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and was named by Foreign Policy magazine in the top 100 global thinkers of 2016. His TED talks have been viewed by over 3 million people, and he has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post. He has previously worked for UNHCR and serves as a Councillor on the World Refugee Council.
Twitter handle: @alexander_betts

Mentioned in this episode

To learn more: Factfulness book launched in April 2018. https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/
To know more about Gapminder:

www.gapminder.org

To know more about Oxford University:
https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications

Show credits

Host: Altaf Makhiawala, Strategic Communicator, IKEA Foundation

Executive Producer: Truus Huisman, Chief Communication Officer

Researcher: Blanche van de Stolpe, Strategic Communicator, IKEA Foundation

An Andy Clark Media Production for the IKEA Foundation

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