worldgovdata
The modern statistical yearbook.
A free, keyless country-data platform that standardises official statistics — World Bank, UN agencies, OECD, Our World in Data — onto one comparable spine: 45.5 million observations, 23,376 indicators, 218 country profiles and a seven-tool analysis workbench.
// the_objective
Make cross-country comparison possible without a day of data-wrangling first. Every publisher names countries differently, carries its own units and ships its own grain — so worldgovdata does that reconciliation once, onto a single canonical spine, and gives the result away: 45.5 million observations and 23,376 indicators across 218 countries, free, keyless and fully attributed.
// our_approach
Our approach
One canonical country spine
Every source is mapped onto a single spine of ISO codes, regions and income groups, and every series is reshaped to the same grain — one value per indicator, country and year — with aggregates and non-country entities dropped. That alignment is the whole product: it is what makes any two indicators, or any two countries, directly comparable.
Licensing as an ingest gate
A source only enters if it is reachable without an API key and licensed for reuse, and only series marked redistributable are ever served — enforced at every layer, from the data marts through to every response. Sources that restrict redistribution are left out, however useful the data would be.
A pipeline that fails safe
A scheduled job fetches each source on the publisher's own cadence — weekly, monthly or quarterly — standardises it onto the spine, then runs contract assertions before anything is published. If a check fails the last good data stays live and the failure is recorded, so the site never breaks and never quietly serves something wrong.
Three surfaces, one spine
The catalogue ranks all 23,376 indicators across every country; 218 profiles turn a country into a statistical portrait grouped by topic, with per-topic indicator counts and world ranks; and every indicator opens as a map, bars, trend, distribution and league table. None of these is a separate dataset — they are all views onto the same spine.
A workbench with shared state
Seven tools — Explore, Correlate, Index builder, Formula, Ranks, Pivot and Compare — share the same pickers, transforms and URL state, so a selection carries from one straight into the next and any view is a link. The formula lab evaluates computed series through a safe expression engine rather than eval.
Provenance as a first-class column
Provider, unit, coverage and licence ride with every series — into the page and into every export. The sources page lists every direct provider with the upstream origins behind it, its row count, latest data year and licence, so a number can always be traced back to who published it.
// the_product
The product
// key_highlights
Key highlights
45.5M observations, 218 countries
23,376 indicators across 218 countries and economies, drawn from 164 direct and upstream sources and grouped into 14 topics — from 639 indicators on governance to 5,549 on education.
Direction-aware by default
The index builder inverts lower-is-better indicators automatically when you weight up to eight of them into a composite, and Compare marks the leader in every row — so "best" always means best, whichever way the metric runs.
Every chart is already a download
Each indicator ships its full time series as CSV or JSON, carrying confidence intervals where the publisher provides them, with the licence and attribution travelling in the file rather than left behind on the page.
Keyless, cookieless, free
No account, no API key, no cookies and no advertising trackers. Page views are counted anonymously and held in memory for the length of a visit, and Do Not Track is honoured.
Honest about what it is
The data belongs to its providers, and the site says so on every page it borrows from — explicitly unaffiliated with any institution it standardises, and clear that corrections to the numbers belong upstream while mapping and display errors are ours.
// the_stack
Tech stack
Next.js
Catalogue, 218 country profiles, indicator pages and workbench
React
Server-rendered views with a lazily-loaded choropleth map
TypeScript
Typed indicator, country and series models end to end
Tailwind CSS
CSS-variable tokens; tri-state theming with no flash
IBM Plex
Serif, Sans and Mono self-hosted — the yearbook typography
Scheduled ingest pipeline
Per-source cadence, spine mapping, contract assertions
CSV / JSON export
Full series with confidence intervals and licence attached
PostHog
Cookieless, in-memory page-view counting only
// faq
Frequently asked questions
- Does Foways build its own products, or only client software?
- Both, and products come first. Foways is a product studio: we design, engineer and run our own software end to end, and we take a small number of custom briefs each year alongside it. Every line is written by our own senior team, never subcontracted.
- Can a product be deployed for a single department or organisation?
- Yes. Setu and Foways Office are both delivered as single-tenant deployments — one instance per customer, self-hosted on infrastructure you choose, updated over the air by us. Nothing is shared with another tenant.
- Can Foways adapt a product to our own requirements?
- Yes. Both government products are built to be extended rather than configured around: capability is added in TypeScript through a stable module interface, so a department gets what it actually needs without forking the product or losing its update path.
// next_step
Talk to us about worldgovdata.
Tell us what you're trying to run. We'll show you the product working, scope the deployment, and give you a straight answer on timeline.