Why we started
Uchimi began after a group of us, students in IB Year 1 at La Garenne International School, spent time in Kenya on a humanitarian trip. What stayed with us afterwards was not a single image but a question we could not answer well: why do so many hard-working, capable people and businesses remain poor and unproductive, decade after decade?
The usual explanations felt too big to be useful. We wanted to understand the problem at the level where it is actually lived, the roadside trader who cannot get stock on credit, the workshop that loses hours to power cuts, the firm that never hires a second employee. These are microeconomic questions, and they turn out to have a serious literature behind them.
What we do
We research and publish short, careful articles and working papers on the frictions behind persistent underdevelopment: informality, low productivity, limited access to capital, weak infrastructure, labour-market frictions, and the everyday costs of doing business. Our focus is deliberately narrow, primarily Kenya and East Africa, because we would rather understand one context reasonably well than gesture at the whole world.
Each piece draws on published research, public data, and, where we can, conversations with people closer to the ground than we are. We are students, not experts, and we write with that firmly in mind.
How we work
Three commitments keep us honest:
We cite what we draw on. We flag what we are unsure about. We treat every article as a draft that can be corrected.
Our work is exploratory and openly provisional. We are not advancing an agenda or advising anyone's policy; we are learning to reason like economists on problems that deserve the effort. When we get something wrong, and we will, we would like to be told, and to fix it in the open.
What this is not
Uchimi is a small research group, not a think tank, an NGO, or a consultancy. We do not raise money, we do not run programmes, and nothing we publish should be read as professional economic or financial advice. It is student work, held to the highest standard we can manage.