Program Overview
The Uunchai Summer Program is a six-week, output-oriented research mentorship for high-school students in Nepal. As a Research Mentor across two cohorts (2025 and 2026), I guided ten students through an end-to-end economics and policy project — from framing a research question to collecting primary data and producing a policy deliverable.
Focus: Turning a real market-and-public-safety question — the quality and market capacity of Nepal's bottled-water sector — into a rigorous, field-driven research output that students could own and present.
What I Led
1. Field Research & Primary Data Collection
I designed and led firsthand data collection on the ground, teaching students how to gather and structure evidence directly from the market:
- Structured interviews with producers, retailers, and consumers on bottled-water quality and public safety
- Sizing Nepal's mineral-water market capacity and mapping the competitive landscape
- Coding qualitative interview material into structured, analyzable data
2. Policy Synthesis & Writing
The cohort translated its findings into a policy-facing deliverable:
- Co-produced a white policy paper on expanding Nepal's mineral-water business to international markets
- Analyzed the diplomatic and regulatory barriers constraining Nepalese exports
- Coached students on structuring an argument and communicating evidence to a non-technical audience
3. Mentorship & Ongoing Work
Beyond the core project, I mentored students on research design, data ethics, and quantitative reasoning. The 2026 cohort is extending into a new strand of primary data analysis and preliminary research on Nepal's Haliya (2008) and Kamaiya (2000) bonded-labor practices, drawing on Nepal statistics-office data and ILO reports.
Skills Demonstrated
Field Research
Primary Data Collection
Qualitative Coding
Market Analysis
Policy Writing
Mentorship