Ideas in Development: Moving billions to evidence

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-e0GAFGaJ0 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moving-billions-towards-evidence/id1866874059?i=1000772910756 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/12UqCmkB4oLLWqoHpT5Lyt?si=6be55d2c81884d65 
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8917092-moving-billions-towards-evidence 
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/moving-billions-towards-evidence

In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process.

In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence.

Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID.