Diasporanomics

Josh Aspden is a specialist in refugee and migrant personal finance, with extensive experience in research, policy, and frontline delivery. A British-Ecuadorian inter-country adoptee, he was born in Ecuador and lived there for 15 years before being raised in the UK, bringing a uniquely personal and global lens to his work.

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Until June 2025, Josh served as Refugee Resettlement Team Leader at Charnwood Borough Council, overseeing the ARAP, ACRS, UKRS, VPRS, and Community Sponsorship schemes across six local authorities in Leicestershire and Rutland. Prior to this, he was Resettlement Policy Officer at the East Midlands Strategic Migration Partnership, supporting 40 local authorities with national migration programmes and emergency coordination. He also contributed as Technical Lead at diaspora consultancy Shabaka, supporting the USAID Switchboard programme with a focus on the Haitian diaspora.

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Across all his roles, Josh has consistently drawn attention to a major gap in the system: financial exclusion and economic precarity among displaced and migrant communities. In response, he founded Diasporanomics a consultancy focused on tackling debt, credit inequality, remittance pressures, and financial insecurity in refugee and migrant contexts. He also authored and delivers the sector-leading training, ‘An Overview of Refugee and Migrant Finance Training: Contextualizing debt, credit, financial exclusion and its impact on integration’ which equips practitioners, researchers, NGO, Local Authority, Central Government, policy makers and funders to better understand the economic dimensions of integration.

 

Josh holds a NOHA European Master’s in International Humanitarian Action and a Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and brings to his work not just technical expertise, but a clear commitment to building inclusive economic systems that work for communities too often left at the margins.
He will begin a part-time, online Master’s in Applied Economics at the University of Strathclyde in September 2025.