Data viz project journal: Ranking Africa’s wealthiest billionaires 2011 -2023
Since I decided to make the leap into data visualization, I’ve had so many thoughts and conflicting emotions. Mainly because it’s a new field I want to make my major line of interest and with everything new, it’s equally scary and exciting.
In my career, I’ve made my fair share of infographics and now I shudder at the errors and mistakes I made because I didn’t know then what I do now. But like they say, life is in stages and I can’t live it all at once. So here I am, at the cusp of an exciting adventure…or that’s the way I see it.
I’ve decided to document my learning process with projects and detail my process in painstaking detail. This would help me achieve two things: One would be to pat myself on the back with the completion of each project and two would be to return to them and learn from them as I progress on this journey.
My very first project charts the wealthiest billionaires in Africa who were ranked in the top 10 categories from the inception of Forbes annual wealth rankings in 2011 to 2023. I’ll lead with my inspiration to my process and finally the finished product.
I got my inspiration from Visual Capitalist infographics- an amazing resource of some of the most mind-blowing and informative infographics. They had done different styles listing out the world’s billionaires and had also charted their positions over several years. So as not to be repetitive, I placed my focus on the top 10 billionaires in Africa and charted their positions across the years from the inception of the Forbes inaugural list in 2011 to the most recent list in 2023.
I started out outlining questions I wanted answers to. I have found that to analyse and even visualize data, there needs to be an objective and an underlying goal. Without something to achieve, it would be extremely difficult to communicate whatever is produced. So, I set out to answer 5 questions with the data.
- How many women have made it to the top of the list over the years?
- When did the richest people have the most and when did they have the least?
- What is the frequency of occurrence of billionaires over the years?
- What is the frequency of occurrence of countries?
- Who dropped out of the list and who didn’t?
I tried getting a prepared dataset of the list of African billionaires over time but my search proved fruitless, so I manually inputted the data from the Forbes African Billionaires list for each year into a Google sheet - a very tedious yet rewarding process. Perhaps there’s a better way to do this and I’m already looking forward to finding out what that is in a future project.
Now with a complete dataset, I proceeded to clean the data by ensuring there were no repetitions or errors in the data. Once I was satisfied with that, I began the process of exploring the data to answer my initial questions. I created a separate table to calculate the frequency of occurrence in each country.
Another table was created to calculate each country's wealth per year and I highlighted the Maximum and minimum values.
With this in place, I was able to filter the cleaned data set to answer the remaining questions and also found some additional interesting insights. Only then was I convinced to fire up Adobe Illustrator and get to work on visualizing the data.
The resulting insights are detailed below:
Only two women, Isabel Dos Santos and Folorunsho Alakija, have made it to the Forbes Billionaires list. Isabel Dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, has made the list’s top ten wealthiest individuals six times from 2014 to 2019. In contrast, Folorunsho Alakija, Nigeria’s oil magnate, reached the tenth position only once in 2014 with a net worth of $2.5 billion.
In 2014, the 10 wealthiest billionaires accumulated $77.7 billion in wealth, the most on record. By contrast, the lowest amount was in 2011, which marked the inaugural Forbes list of the richest people. This may have contributed to the lower total that year.
Out of the 9 countries that have produced the wealthiest billionaires in Africa, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria are the 3 countries that have appeared the most in the past 3 years.
8 billionaires remained in the top 10 from the inception of the list while 13 billionaires at one point made the list but dropped off.
Aliko Dangote has been the wealthiest man from the inauguration of the report till date. In 2014, he had the highest net worth so far at 25 billion. He has since not been able to top that amount. His lowest recorded net worth is in 2020 at 10.1 billion
The final infographic that charts the full list of the top 10 African billionaires can be found here.
Tools I used
There are a ton of tools available for data visualization and with each project, I’ll be trying out the ones I have an affinity to. For this project, I mainly used:
- Google sheet to analyse data
- Adobe Illustrator to visualise and stylise data
- Notion to document my process
