Student-led research · Kenya & East Africa
Short, serious research on why development stalls at the level of the firm, the worker, and the household.
Uchimi began after a group of secondary-school students spent time in Kenya and kept returning to one question: why do so many capable people and businesses stay small and unproductive?
We read the literature, talk to people closer to the ground than we are, and publish careful notes on the microeconomic frictions behind persistent underdevelopment, informality, thin access to capital, labour-market frictions, and the cost of doing ordinary business.
Why so many enterprises stay informal and never add workers, and what raises the ceiling on their growth.
Credit constraints, savings behaviour, and whether digital finance genuinely relaxes them.
Search and matching frictions, skills mismatch, and the economics of casual and informal work.
How power, roads, and connectivity shape what small producers can realistically do.
The management, technology, and organisational gaps that keep output per worker low.
Registration, regulation, and transaction costs that make ordinary commerce expensive.
About the initiative
We are IB students who take these questions seriously. Uchimi exists to practise real economic reasoning, reading primary sources, handling data honestly, and writing clearly, on problems that matter rather than on textbook abstractions.
Our work is exploratory and openly provisional. We cite what we draw on, flag what we are unsure about, and treat every article as a draft that can be corrected. Read more about our approach →