Dr Daisy Ogembo

• LLB, University of Nairobi (2006)
• Call to the Bar, Kenya (2008)
• LLM (Commercial and Corporate Law), University of London (2013)
• DPhil, University of Oxford (2019)

Daisy Ogembo is a non-practising Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and joined Birmingham Law School as an Assistant Professor in 2022. She was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford University Faculty of Law and a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Daisy holds degrees from Oxford (DPhil, 2019), London (LLM, 2013), and Nairobi (LLB, 2006). She worked as a litigation lawyer for six years in Kenya's leading law firm, Oraro & Company Advocates, and subsequently commenced a career in academia at Strathmore Law School, Nairobi. She completed a DPhil thesis on the taxation of self-employed professionals in 2019 and was awarded a British Academy-funded three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the same year.

Daisy's area of research is tax law, an inherently interdisciplinary speciality that draws heavily from scholarly perspectives in constitutional and administrative law, economics, politics, and psychology. Various funders have funded her research over the last eight years, including the British Academy, the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, the European Commission, the Harvey Fellowship, the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance (Munich), and the African Tax Administrator's Forum.

• Business Taxation
• Equity, Trusts, Wills, & Formalities

• Tax Law, Tax Policy, and Tax Theory
• Taxation of the Informal Sector and Self-Employed
• Taxation in African Countries
• Socio-legal approaches to tax research
• Public law issues in taxation
• Taxation of digital platform workers

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Daisy Ogembo pursues several interrelated strands of research. Her research primarily aims to contribute to the global understanding of the operational difficulties that tax authorities contend with when discharging their core mandate and the broader legal, socio-economic, and political contexts upon which their success is contingent. One strand of research contributes significantly to the multidisciplinary literature on the taxation of 'hard-to-tax' taxpayers. It includes peer-reviewed articles utilising the empirical research findings of her research on the hard-to-tax demonstrating the usefulness of presumptive (simplified) tax regimes for newly qualified professionals in African countries and the effects of corruption and the government's inadequate service delivery on tax morale.

The second strand of research focuses on the difficulties tax authorities contend with when taxing digital platform workers and considers possible solutions in various contexts. In addition, her current research on the constitutional aspects of tax law in select African countries also contributes to the timely and essential move to diversify legal studies beyond the traditional western focus.