What in 1in8B is real and what is not

The “Born just now” feed

The home page shows a feed: “A girl in Nigeria”, “A boy in India”. It is not a live link to maternity wards. Nobody in the world has such data in real time: births are registered days or weeks later, each country in its own way, and for a quarter of children under five the birth was never recorded at all (UNICEF).

Two things in the feed are real. The pace: about 132 million babies are born on Earth each year, 4.2 a second, and new lines appear at the same average rate with the same random gaps. And the countries: each line goes to a country with the same chance that a baby is born there, and there are slightly more boys than girls, as in real life. The “girl in Nigeria” herself is an example of who is really being born somewhere right now, not a record of a particular child.

How your country is chosen

When you press “Be born”, the game holds a draw in which every country has as many tickets as it has births a year. What counts is births, not population: Japan has several times more people than Niger, but more babies are born in Niger.

That is why India comes up most often: 1 in 6. China, Nigeria and Pakistan follow. The ten most likely countries are in the table; all 186 are on the odds-by-country page.

Odds by country

How a life unfolds

From there, life goes one year at a time. Each year the game decides what happened using your country’s numbers: death rates by sex and age, child and maternal mortality, school and university enrolment, unemployment, the share of people working in farming, HIV, homicide, road deaths, smoking and about ten more. Your family’s income depends on which fifth of the country by wealth you were born into and on how unequal the country is.

Your choices shift the odds but do not cancel them. Study opens better jobs, treatment helps you survive an illness, and after you move to a city or another country your life follows that place’s numbers.

The grey lines with numbers

Under many events there is a grey line with the real number for your country and the source in brackets, for example “In Niger, 1 in 9 children dies before age 5 (UN)”. If no published figure exists for a country and the data holds an estimate, the game does not show that line.

What is made up

Names, towns, parents, jobs and every particular event are fiction, although how often things happen rests on statistics. The characters have nothing to do with real people. And the game simplifies, of course: much of what matters in a real life is reduced to a few numbers and events.

A few places are not in the game: Taiwan, Réunion, Mayotte, Western Sahara and Guadeloupe. Together they account for less than 0.2% of all births on Earth.

Where the data comes from

All numbers come from open sources. For every country and every indicator we keep the value, the year and the source. The main sources:

• Population, births, life expectancy, child and adult mortality: the UN (World Population Prospects 2024 and the UN IGME group) via the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (release of October 8, 2026).
• Income per person: the World Bank (GDP at purchasing power parity), the IMF for a few countries. Inequality: the World Bank’s Gini index.
• School, university and literacy: UNESCO. Average years of schooling: UNDP, Human Development Report 2025.
• Maternal mortality: the 2025 estimates of WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, the World Bank and the UN.
• Child marriage: UNICEF. HIV: UNAIDS. Homicide: UNODC. Suicide, road deaths and tobacco: WHO.
• Work and unemployment: the International Labour Organization. Migrants: the UN (International Migrant Stock 2024). Life evaluation: World Happiness Report 2025.

Where no published figure exists, we use an estimate from similar countries. That is 259 values out of 5,394. Almost all of them belong to small territories such as Hong Kong, Macao and the Channel Islands, or are literacy and child marriage in rich countries, where these are usually not measured.