Rising inequalities in outcomes and opportunities are direct threats to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Without the necessary tools to guide evidence-based policies related interventions may be less effective and more costly.
With this in mind and the pledge of member States to Leave No One Behind, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) developed the Leaving No One Behind (LNOB) Platform, an innovative and easy-to-use online diagnostic tool for policymakers to measure inequalities in access to opportunities and identify the population groups left furthest behind in, for example, access to basic water, sanitation, clean energy and the Internet. It also developed a tailored training package, currently covering India, Mongolia, the Philippines, Tonga and Turkmenistan.
On 26 and 27 May 2022, ESCAP in close collaboration with the UN Resident Coordinator's Office in Tonga convened the training "An Introduction to the Leaving No One Behind (LNOB) Analysis" in Tonga. The training aims to teach participants to: (1) understand the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) methodology and how it is used to identify the furthest behind, and (2) understand the Dissimilarity Index (D-Index) and how it is calculated to provide a single numerical value that summarized inequality in a particular development area. This first of two training modules focused on representatives from the Tonga Statistics Department. It covered inequalities in 16 specific SDG indicators, such as SDG 4.1 on upper secondary education completion and SDG 5.2 on violence against women. The training also covered issues on replication of results using various data sources such as MICS and HIES.
With the Government's Statistics Department located directly under the purview of the Prime Minister's Office, it is expected that the ESCAP platform and training will prove helpful in strengthening Tonga's evidence-based policymaking.
