The Interactive Social Policy Simulator (ISPS)®
Our user-friendly software and applications enable policymakers to visualise and explore household survey results and other administrative datasets, allowing them to test policy scenarios, adjust program inputs, and predict potential outcomes. By interacting directly with field data and observing the simulated impacts of policy decisions, policymakers can design more effective and cost-efficient social policies that positively affect communities worldwide.
© Dominic Chavez/World Bank. Link.
Our Approach
Development Analytics has designed the Interactive Social Policy Simulator (ISPS) to allow policy-makers to effectively design and expand social protection. Without writing a single line of code, ISPS empowers policy-makers to design more cost-effective policies in several domains, including cash transfer targeting, service provision, and predictive modelling for early-warning systems.
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Household-level or administrative datasets can be embedded into the Interactive Social Policy Simulator to make real-time calculations based on policy parameter selections. As a result, this interactive tool makes it possible for policy-makers to experiment with complex statistical models for targeting social policies and programmes without the need for advanced coding techniques. The tool also allows for a better comprehension of the data and evidence, visualizing the distributional impact of policy decisions. With this new simulator, policy-makers and implementers can directly interact with data from the field while observing the social impact of different policy scenarios and fine-tuning their policy decisions.
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Development Analytics has developed and piloted the ISPS as an ex-ante policy evaluation tool for considering targeting options for social protection and humanitarian cash transfer programs for various stakeholders, including The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), DG for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations of the European Commission (DG ECHO) and several UNICEF country offices. The tool shows the poverty-reducing impact of several cash transfer scenarios targeting different groups at varying benefit levels, changing interactively with the choice of policy-makers.
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The ISPS has proved its functionality by allowing policy-makers to visualise and experiment with the results of household surveys, change parameters, adjust programme inputs (based on cost and cost-effectiveness measures), and predict the probable outcomes of various social policy scenarios. ISPS, therefore, improved the ability to simulate multiple outcomes of their choosing without relying on predetermined scenarios by technical experts.
If you would like to learn more about ISPS and how this can be useful to you in your programmatic context, please register your interest.