Climate Change. The Gig Economy. Political Turmoil. Are We Prepared for a Changing World?

The World Bank has some information about that, which it wants people to pay attention to. It has turned that information into a white paper, Protecting All—Risk Sharing for a Diverse and Diversifying World of Work, which outlines the bank’s stance on social protection in developed and developing countries. The thing is, it’s a massive document and it’s a bit dry.

Social protection is a set of risk-sharing policies that governments create to protect their citizens. These policies help prevent people from falling into poverty and create better chances for economic growth for everyone. In other words, they’re social safety nets. These policies have to be paid for by governments. It’s not as easy for governments to get the money they need as it once was. In high-income countries across the world, more and more workers are making a living in the gig economy. In developing countries, work has always been informal and fluid.

This means that governments have to create new ways of thinking about social protection as a way to protect against catastrophic economic shocks and to support the eradication of poverty. The World Bank wanted to reach a broad audience with its analysis to urge countries to modernise their policies. Modern social protection policies will support The World Bank’s goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity for all.

US motion design studio, Bien, was given the job of making all of that information palatable. It turned The World Bank Group’s thinking on modern risk-sharing and social protection policy into an animated two-minute film.

“How can we distil 160 pages of analysis and policy recommendations into a two-minute film? This was the question The World Bank posed to us,” stated Hung Le, creative director at Bien. “To accomplish this, we worked with the World Bank team to zero in on the report’s key messages. Using 2D and 3D graphics, illustrations, and sound design to create a surreal world, we brought viewers along a journey to see how low and high-income country workers alike are converging in the world of work. We used the “surreal world” as a visual tool to indicate the globality of the issues discussed in the report, which affect both the developed and developing world.”

Ricardo Roberts, executive producer, added, “We knew this would be an opportunity to play a role in making technical but important material accessible to a wider audience. As a studio, our goal was simple: to make the best video ever created about social protection and risk-sharing policy.”

Here is the film: