When 13-year-old Karuna Rawal, a student from Jumla, received her acceptance email into the Uunchai programme, she was overjoyed. Karuna’s desire to discover the mathematics behind the ninja stars she made at home was fulfilled after she got a remote Nepali mentor and a team of six friends. At a young age, she was introduced to the concepts of mathematical modelling and intermediate origami shapes.

Uunchai is a six-week virtual project-based learning summer programme organised by the FountED Foundation in collaboration with student mentors from prestigious universities in the USA and Nepal, according to the programme’s website.

A high school graduate, Salina Trital of Morang, has a different story. After studying science in her A-level curriculum, she wanted to explore a non-science field after her exams. So, she landed as a research intern at Equity Bridge Nepal (EBN), where she prepared study materials on financial literacy along with her team. Today around 80 students of three public schools of Kathmandu have benefitted from her team’s work.

Similar to Karuna and Salina, hundreds of Nepali students across the country have found ways to explore interests and impact their communities. Student-run initiatives led by Nepali undergrads from the US, like Uunchai and EBN, connect curious Nepali students online for innovation-driven and real-world projects.

Through such initiatives, the Nepali students abroad lead projects and help youngsters back home. On the other hand, pre-college students in Nepal apply their knowledge beyond classrooms, and enrich their learning experience.

Sujal Shah, a sophomore at Franklin and Marshall college, completed his secondary schooling in Sunsari. He was oblivious to external learning opportunities until after high school. Eager to do something in Nepal, he alongside two friends, launched a summer programme under the motto, “exposure for innovation”.

The six-week programme tailored for both middle and high school students, however a new idea, might pose challenges in understanding concepts, while building projects, due to varied skill levels. To address this, mentors adjust their explanations according to their mentees’ comprehending ability, says Sujal. Likewise, Uunchai equally aims to foster transferable skills like communication and presentation, which are ‘necessary throughout life’.

Uunchai selected 38 mentees out of 770+ applications in its debut cohort of 2024, who were then distributed into ‘mentor-led teams’, each team engaging in a specific project.

An Uunchai mentee, Nischit Bhandari secured an internship at Xuno—a software company—as an AI intern. He is now a junior AI developer at the company. Uunchai partners with organisations like eSewa and Pathao to provide internship opportunities to a few of its mentees based on their performance in the programme.

While Uunchai is a new venture, Incubate Nepal—an initiative by MIT and Harvard students during the Covid pandemic—emerged in 2020 as a remote platform for collaboration and learning, targeting 11th and 12th grade graduates.

“We felt that Covid-19 limited the learning opportunity for students who loved to engage in learning by doing things. So we came up with this idea of an eight-week programme,” Bibek Pandit, one of the five co-founders, said.

Incubate Nepal admits mentees, mentors, peer mentors and student leaders every year between January and June via an open application process.

Apart from the mentees and peer mentors, whose applications are shortlisted by mentors, the rest of the applications are directly reviewed by the organisers of Incubate Nepal.

“More than anything, I met amazing people in this programme. In my first year as a mentee, I was allowed to do two projects because I did not shy away from expressing my passion to mentors despite using a virtual platform,” Pratyush Bhattarai, who continued as a student leader in the latter two years, shared his experience.

However, some students have complained about free-riding (partial involvement of team members), and incomplete final products. On this, the organisers have said they are working on improving those problems.

At Incubate Nepal and Uunchai, students have developed apps to identify paper notes for the blind, an AI that generates folk stories, and written papers spanning natural science and non-science fields.

Though Uunchai and Incubate Nepal primarily focus on bringing together students to work on projects, there are organisations whose sole purpose is to make an impact in society. Students take on specific responsibilities and assist as team members. Equity Bridge Nepal and Reinstalling Hope (RH) are prominent examples.

While the former focuses on creating role models among students of underrepresented communities through soft skills, teacher-training and career guidance sessions, the latter deals with bringing quality education in rural areas and supporting education development with a holistic approach.

Laxman Bist, the programme manager of RH says, “We discovered RH at a time when it was inactive, and joined in with the founders after our visions on education collided.” Originally founded in 2014, the organisation restructured its programmes recently.

Communicating with foreign people and exchanging cultural values was fascinating for a local fellow Anuska Acharya. “We also visited many places around Kathmandu and taught drama and film studies to the students of Southwestern school,” she said.

RH recruits local fellows every year to guide foreign students who choose Nepal to pursue their internships.

Anuska was also a mentee in RH’s mentorship programme where she was mentored by Diya Pandey, a sophomore at Lehigh University. The programme helped in crafting her application to the colleges of the United States, which is the sole purpose of the programme. She was accepted to Wellesley college.

“Our digital learning programme targets schools where students have lower SEE [Secondary Education Examinations] pass rates and where schools lack full time teachers,” Laxman informed. He proudly stated that they’ve maximised the SEE pass rate to 100 percent among the students they teach. RH hires high school students and graduates to remotely teach students Science, Math and English subjects, and students get to see their lessons live on a projector at their school.

RH also recruits social media interns, tech interns and graphics designing interns occasionally.

At EBN, however, the co-founders have a different plan. Though in the past year projects they ran the programmes on their own, since 2024, they have provided a platform for high school students to help them run the programme through roles of research interns, social media interns and web designing interns.

One of the two co-founders, Himal Pandey, shedding light on a new plan says, “We will soon launch a summer programme where students can work on preparing prototype apps and draft documents under the guidance of a mentor.” He claims the final products prepared in the end of the programme ‘will help in their mission’ of creating systematic pathways to a strong career for students (especially from first-generation low-income communities.)

Salina has shared both personal and professional experiences with her team since joining EBN last year. She looks forward to continuing the financial literacy programme in schools of her community.

If the participants’ experience is anything to go by, the participation in such programmes, though mostly remotely, enhances learning and adds experience to the CV of the individual and also forms connections with people across the world.

“Earlier, I used to think I could not do anything for society, but after getting into EBN I realised I was wrong,” shares Salina, who is glad to have made a difference in the lives of some students.