This elective course introduces students to the challenges that policymakers, managers, non-profit managers, and political leaders face to improve effectiveness and impact of public programs and investments. It is designed to help you to think in a critical and creative manner about the challenges of designing, monitoring and evaluating public programs. The course covers aspects such as building a theory of change to assess a program and improve it, which data to collect, thinking about implementing evidence-based changes, differences between monitoring and evaluation, and understanding the variety of approaches for assessing and improving public programs. Accordingly, there will be discussion based on case studies and the course will be highly interactive in its design and be run more like a workshop than a seminar, designed to help you think creatively and critically about designing, monitoring and evaluation, and its main principle is to assess and improve public programs and investments made by governments as well as by NGOs.