The world is stuck in the past, Hans Rosling showed us the way forward

The death of Hans Rosling was greeted with universal sadness in the aid world. It wasn’t just that Rosling was a deeply decent person and a bona fide humanitarian. The aid world loved Rosling because he made aid policy discussions look much more interesting than they actually are.

From his first TED talk, through the work of the GapMinder Foundation, to the famous television interview in which he showed the interviewer the sole of his shoe, Rosling raised the profile of development issues, and did it in a way which was engaging and credible. This was no small feat – but it wasn’t the reason why Rosling was important.

The importance of his work – continued now by his son Ola, his daughter-in-law Anna and the GapMinder Foundation – was in pointing out one simple fact, repeatedly but from different angles: our understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed because it is stuck in the past.

A recent example of this could be seen during the European migrant crisis. There are countless examples on social media and in comments sections that these could not possibly be real refugees – because they are carrying mobile phones. Citizens of relatively well-off western countries have simply failed to notice the global penetration of mobile telephones.

These same citizens also carry with them a mental model of what a refugee looks like: female, carrying a child, dirt poor, clothed in rags, probably wounded and/or starving, driven from their simple rural lives by roaming militia. Most of the migrants they see arriving today don’t fit this model – but instead of updating the model, their response is to deny that these could possibly be refugees.

Such models are based on two primary sources: education and media. Representations of Africa in particular are so predictable that the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina was prompted to pen his classic essay “How to Write about Africa”. A decade later, and the international media are only now starting to become more interested in Africa’s thriving entrepreneurs than its endangered species.

Yet a large portion of the blame for these false assumptions lies with the aid organisations that claim to be working on behalf of the people in those countries. Their requirements of fundraising and advocacy meant that Africans could rarely be represented as anything other that the vulnerable recipient of western generosity, locking them into a vicious circle of negative perceptions.

The humanitarian sector recognises this in the final point of the Red Cross Code of Conduct: “In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects”. Yet we continue to propagate a particular image of aid recipients that serves our needs of information, publicity and advertising, rather than theirs.

From the Middle East to Central Asia, from South Africa to Latin America, western perceptions of “the other” were locked in place during the period immediately after the second world war. As the European empires fell, they were replaced by the idea of the Third World – a useful narrative device to support the political interests of both sides in the Cold War.

The Third World was a useful concept but not an accurate one, and the gap between this narrative and reality became increasingly clear after the end of the Cold War. By that time several generations had been raised to think of themselves as First World – and the rest as not really worth thinking about. The unfortunate result is that we are not equipped to understand the world as it is today.

Hans Rosling spent the last half of his life improving that understanding, because even seasoned aid workers (myself included) initially fail GapMinder’s ignorance test. It’s not enough to honour Rosling’s legacy by engaging with global public health challenges – we must also continue the struggle to update the assumptions that our fellow citizens unknowingly carry around with them.

This becomes especially critical in a post-truth world, especially if decision-makers rely on alternative facts rather than addressing reality. While Rosling showed that the world is a far better place than most of us imagine, the progress we’ve made is not guaranteed. The stakes have never been higher – yet those stakes are still often misunderstood, despite Rosling’s work.

Paul Currion is a humanitarian consultant. Follow @paulcurrion on Twitter.

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter. Join the conversation with the hashtag #Dev2030.