Research Mentorship for Undergraduate Medical Students in Low-Income Settings: A Perspective from Uganda

Research mentorship is widely regarded as the single most effective route into research for medical students, yet it remains least accessible in low-income settings, where mentor time, institutional funding, and ethical infrastructure are all constrained. This Perspective, a descriptive account of early implementation experience rather than a formal program evaluation, presents the design and implementation of a phased, student-led research mentorship program for medical students at Makerere University, Uganda, and argues that closing this gap requires redesigning mentorship models rather than importing well-resourced ones. The program sequenced training to begin with evidence synthesis, which required neither funding nor ethical approval, before progressing to primary research, and distributed mentorship across small peer groups rather than one-to-one faculty pairings. Implementation nonetheless surfaced substantial challenges: mentor hesitancy and inconsistent availability, conflicting schedules between mentors and time-pressured students, high attrition, with only 33 of 75 enrolled students (44%) attending all five webinars, and difficulty absorbing students who joined after the program began. Five months in, only 5 of 13 groups had completed the deliverable needed to begin the program's second phase. Drawing on these findings alongside comparable near-peer and institutionally anchored mentorship models elsewhere, this Perspective argues that mentorship in resource-constrained settings requires deliberate structural design, tiered near-peer mentoring, proactive institutional anchoring, and modular entry points, rather than reliance on volunteer goodwill, and proposes these as concrete considerations for the program's next phase.