For a few years now, my wife and I have sponsored a little girl through Compassion International. For those unfamiliar with Compassion, here is a blurb from their website:

Compassion International is a child-advocacy ministry that pairs compassionate people with those who are suffering from poverty. The ministry releases children from spiritual, economic, social, and physical poverty. The goal is for each child to become a responsible and fulfilled adult.

We are blessed to sponsor this little girl named Maameesi who lives in the region of Adansi in Ghana and will turn 8 years old at the end of this year. Maameesi lives about 70 miles northwest of Accra (Ghana’s capital) in a rural area comprised of mainly subsistence farmers. But while we have some basic information about Maameesi’s community and family life, it occurred to me that I know absolutely nothing about the current state of Ghana. With that in mind, I decided to start digging for data.

Surprisingly, it is not that difficult to find data on Ghana. The Ghanian government has actually launched an Open Data Initiative website that contains some data, but appears to still be in process of being fully populated. Additionally, there are websites such as childmortality.org that contains country-specific data on child mortality rates (one of many key indicators for a country’s current state). However, by leaps and bounds the best data source I found came from the World Bank. From the World Bank’s data webpage for Ghana one can download a .csv file containing time series of over 1,500 indicators!

Now, of course I am not going to have you slog through over a thousand plots to show the historical and current state of Ghana. Instead, I selected what I considered to be a few key indicators from this data set and plotted the time series. The interactive storyboard below contains each of these time series with some explanatory text. A few key takeaways for me:

  1. Ghana is—in most respects—in a better state than I expected.
  2. The living conditions in Ghana have been steadily improving over time, which is good news; however, much more improvement still needs to happen.
  3. A key success story is that more than 8 out of 10 primary school-aged children are actually enrolled in primary school in Ghana. That is much higher than I expected, and it bodes well for Ghana’s future in moving up the income and livelihood chain.

Without further adieu, enjoy the following interactive story. I hope that just like I did, you will learn a thing or two about Ghana.