The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) was implementing a technical assistance project to build technical capacity in Cambodia and the Maldives to analyse household-level micro data with innovative methodologies to assess the potential impact of social protection schemes on people furthest left behind in the context of accessing basic opportunities. The ultimate objective of the project was to help governments mainstream results into policy documents or tools to design and implement inclusive and evidence-based social protection policies.  The project built on two user-friendly policy tools already developed by ESCAP: 

1. The Leaving No One Behind (LNOB) Platform helped users explore how various circumstances intersect and create inequalities in access to basic opportunities captured by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators. Building on Classification and Regress Trees (CART) and the Dissimilarity index (D-index), the Platform analysed nationally representative household surveys to generate and visualize evidence at national and subnational levels to identify groups left furthest behind and the circumstances they shared in 19 SDG indicators and 33 countries across Asia and the Pacific.

2. The Social Protection Online Toolbox (SPOT) Simulator helped users design a mix of non-contributory social protection schemes and demonstrates the impact of hypothetical scenarios on poverty, inequality and consumption. The tool also projected the cost of such schemes. The results were obtained by using national representative household surveys such as Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) in 27 countries across Asia and the Pacific.

Merging these two innovative tools, ESCAP developed a new app, Social Protection to Leave no One Behind (SP2LNOB) App, which demonstrated the impact of extending social protection on inequality of opportunity. Using this tool, governments could assess the potential impact social protection on strengthening equality of opportunity in a variety of priority areas including nutrition, health, education and living standards, among others. In addition to offline policy experimentation, the new tool, if desired, could also provide an online extension to showcase results to the public.

The prototype of the tool was introduced to representatives from Cambodia and Maldives in September 2024 to seek their feedback and ensure country-specific contextualization. In the technical training, ESCAP built capacity among technical specialists from target countries to use and modify the underlying algorithm associated with the SP2LNOB App. The training also provided a platform for discussing further updates and improvements to the tool ahead of national policy workshops.