Naohiko Omata

Naohiko Omata is Associate Professor at the Refugee Studies Centre at ODID. He holds a DPhil in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London, and an MA from Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Naohiko has conducted substantial research on the socio-economic lives of refugees and their access to durable solutions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2014, he has led the qualitative research strand of the Refugee Economies Programme, a large-scale interdisciplinary study focusing on the economic lives of refugees in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. In recent years, he has spearheaded another five-country research initiative titled Borders, Mobility and Livelihoods, which explores the movements of refugees across borders in East and Central Africa.

Over the course of his career, Naohiko has published two books: Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development (2016, with Betts, Bloom & Kaplan) and The Myth of Self-Reliance: Economic Lives inside a Liberian Refugee Camp (2017). His work has also been widely published in prestigious academic journals including World Development, African Affairs, Disasters. Journal of Refugee Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Third World Quarterly.  

Before entering academia, Naohiko worked as an aid practitioner and consultant for UNDP, UNHCR, and various international and local NGOs in countries in Sub-Saharan African. He has also served on advisory boards for a number of UN agencies and bilateral donors. Beyond the academic sphere, Naohiko has been actively engaged in non-fiction writing on the subject of forced migration. His books have been adopted as supplementary textbooks in high schools and universities in Japan and South Korea.