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Trillions of dollars are invested yearly in programmes to improve health, social welfare, education, and justice (which we will refer to generally as public programmes). Yet we know little about the effects of most of these attempts to improve peoples’ lives, and what we do know is often not used to inform decisions. We propose that governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) address this failure responsibly by mandating more systematic and transparent use of research evidence to assess the likely effects of public programmes before they are launched, and the better use of well designed impact evaluations after they are launched. Resources for public programmes will always be scarce. In low-income and middle-income countries, where there are often particularly severe constraints on resources and many competing priorities, available resources have to be used as efficiently as possible to address …