Jun 8 • General discussion
The World as a Village of 100 People
The title of this United World College (UWC) endorsed online short course intrigued me so much that I applied and… I got accepted as one of 13 villagers entering the experience together!
We are a deliberate mix: different continents, countries, genders and ages. Over four weeks, we will imagine the world as a village of 100 people while exploring global inequality, identity, interdependence and citizenship. We are guided by facilitator Kevin Fox, Human Geographer and founder of The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute.
Last weekend we had the first two sessions that were all about orientation: meeting the other villagers and looking at/discussing statistics. One thing became immediately clear: we all see through our own lens but often unconsciously adopt a dominant perspective when observing the world. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called it the danger of a single story. I’d call it something more uncomfortable: the quiet acceptance of someone else’s definition of reality.
That discomfort sits at the heart of what I want to explore in these four weeks, because the story of global inequality is not an accidental one. It is not a story of some nations simply failing to develop while others succeeded. The opening quote from the World Inequality Report 2026 says it plainly: inequality is a political choice. It is, in many ways, designed.
Nations across the Global South are routinely labelled “underdeveloped”; a word that carries the assumption that the people there lack the capacity, financially and intellectually, to lift themselves without the guidance of the Global North.
The so-called migration crisis is presented as a stand-alone emergency, stripped of its context: the decades of extraction, interference and deliberate policy choices that created the conditions for it.
I don’t believe these are oversights, but rather features of a framework that locates the problem conveniently close to those it has already disadvantaged. And the solution just as conveniently in the hands of those who designed it.
Then there are the metrics. The World Inequality Report 2026 measures much of its data in US Dollars. Which raises a question worth sitting with: whose definition of wealth are we accepting when we do that? If the world were one village of 100 people, 8 would have completed a university degree. Does that tell us anything meaningful about the intelligence or capability of the other 92? If the Strait of Hormuz were blocked for another six months, who would fare better? The degree holder or the person who masters life skills like knowing how to grow food?
I am not romanticising poverty. There is absolutely nothing noble about deprivation. But I am deeply interested in the untold human stories that statistics hide. The stories that exist outside the frame of GDP, income brackets and educational credentials. After all, every data point represents a life being lived according to its own logic, wisdom and set of values that the dominant framework was never designed to see.
As the saying goes: some people are so poor, they only have money!
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The World as a Village of 100 People
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