 It is the administrative center of Kuraz woreda.Although during the Italian occupation there was an official in residence at Kelem (as it was known then), who encouraged the local Daasanach to resist and repulse an advance of 3,000 men of the King's African Rifles in early 1941, until the 1970s Omorate was little more than one of a handful of scattered police stations in this part of Ethiopia.In a more recent publication, although describing Omorate as an "archetypical tropical backwater", Philip Briggs notes that the village is "epitomised by the relics of the agricultural cotton scheme that was initiated with North Korean funds in the Mengistu era and faltered to a standstill more than a decade back.