Leaving no one behind (LNOB) is the central, transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). LNOB means moving beyond assessing average and aggregate progress, towards ensuring progress for all population groups at a disaggregated level. 

To support governments and the United Nations system in the Asia-Pacific region, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has developed a user-friendly diagnostic tool called Leave No One Behind (LNOB) platform. The tool is used to improve the understanding of how various circumstances intersect and create inequalities in access to basic opportunities covered by the Sustainable Development Goals. Building on empirical methodologies such as Classification and Regress Trees (CART) and the Dissimilarity index (D-index), it uses data and statistics at national and subnational levels to identify groups left furthest behind and the circumstances they share.

In this expert group meeting (EGM), ESCAP will introduce the LNOB tool, collect feedback from experts in explaining the key results and carry out guided and interactive policy discussion on how results from the LNOB tool can strengthen policy design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in Fiji with particular attention to the upcoming Voluntary National Review for Fiji in July 2023.