Blooming Pacific - Exploring Poverty in the Pacific Region by Kristin Baumann

This interactive, explorative data visualization looks into the question "How does the risk of living in poverty vary by gender, age and whether you live in an urban or rural area in a Pacific country?" and was created as part of the Pacific Dataviz Challenge.

The project, titled "Blooming", uses the analogy of a plant with blooming flowers to symbolize growth and a journey out of poverty for all age groups, urbanization levels, and regions. A big flower with lots of blossoms shows that a group of people of a specific age in an either urban or rural location only rarely faces poverty. This community blooms. By looking closer at the white-yellowish blossoms one can then explore the gender-based differences in facing poverty in detail via tooltips. The plants are slightly different each time you load the data viz to emphasize the individuality of the people they represent.

The stylized plant resembles the plant Amborella trichopoda which is only endemic to New Caledonia's forests and therefore cannot be found anywhere else on the planet. This metaphor also points out that the status quo of poverty related to gender, the reasons for such a status quo, and a way to reduce poverty is unique to the Pacific region while the data collection for indicators like the Sustainable Development Goals is done globally.