Stephen Yeo is the STEG Research Uptake Manager. He was CEO of CEPR until 2014, having joined CEPR at its establishment in 1983. In 1995, he worked with the Department of Trade and Industry in South Africa to establish the Trade and Industrial Policy Secretariat, a think tank providing policy advice to the Department with funding from IDRC. He served on the TIPS Advisory Board from 1996 until 2018. He subsequently worked with IDRC to establish the Southern African Trade Research Network, launched in 2001; and its successor, the Southern African Development Research Network. In 2010 he worked for the World Bank, designing a programme to strengthen policy research in Southern Africa. He was a founding Board member of the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET), based in Accra, Ghana, and chaired its Finance and Audit Committee from 2008 to 2018. He currently leads the team evaluating the International Growth Centre. He has also coordinated a number of strategic planning and institutional strengthening exercises, for example for the DFID-funded Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR) and the IDRC-funded Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP), both based in Nairobi; and for the Zimbabwe Economic Policy Analysis and Research Unit (ZEPARU), an ACBF-funded think tank in Harare.
In 2007, for example, along with Romesh Vaitilingam he helped launch www.VoxEU.org, which is now the most popular portal for economic policy research worldwide. In 2009 Yeo and Vaitilingam launched Vox Talks, the first podcasts to feature economic research and economic researchers. In 2011 he helped design the DFID-funded PEDL programme.