Mental Well-Being Belongs in Business Support

Running a business is hard. For women facing unequal access to funding, it can be harder. Yet the language of entrepreneurship leaves little room for that difficulty: be resilient, think bigger, move faster. Support programs must examine whether the pressure to demonstrate progress makes it harder for founders to speak honestly.

A 2021 report by the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative found that accelerators helped all-men teams raise investment more than they helped all-women teams. For us, that raises a simple question: what support are women entrepreneurs still missing? With three of our four businesses led or co-led by women, we want to learn from their experiences and build around what they actually need.[1]

Mental well-being support cannot correct unequal access to capital. But while working to improve that access, we must consider whether our own expectations add pressure to the people we intend to support.

At Safari Strives, our mentors work with entrepreneurs on human-centered design and becoming growth-ready. In Rubavu, this has sometimes meant revisiting the problem a founder initially brought to us. Grace sought funding to continue importing packaging for her cosmetics. The discussion became about whether that packaging communicated what made her products distinctive.

Today, Grace, one of the women entrepreneurs in our cohort, is prototyping more sustainable packaging and exploring opportunities to sell in France. These are significant strides. For the women building businesses with us, meaningful support must evolve with those ambitions, through relevant expertise, market connections, and room to discuss difficulties without having their potential questioned.

Daisy Rosales, co-founder of Brio, helped deepen this conversation when she joined our entrepreneurs. Her work emphasizes psychological flexibility: staying engaged with what matters while making room for difficult thoughts and emotions.[2] When someone has invested years of effort and personal identity in a business, questioning its direction can feel like questioning the person who built it. Our mentoring should help founders examine difficult feedback, weigh alternatives, and revise decisions without treating every setback as a personal failure.

That requires an environment where uncertainty can be expressed. In Rwanda, stigma remains a barrier to seeking mental health support.[3] Within our program, another question deserves attention: how freely will an entrepreneur describe a struggle to the people assessing their progress and helping determine their funding?

This is where our commitment to listening must become practical. We intend to make space in milestone reviews for founders to explain what changed, what they learned, and whether a target needs revising. A missed deadline should prompt that conversation before it becomes a judgment about commitment.

As a nonprofit founder, I see honest feedback as essential to improving our work. Safari Strives will pair expectations for progress with a clearer opportunity to question the support itself. We will ask what is helping, what is adding pressure, and what needs to change, then use those answers to adjust our mentoring and milestones.

Sources

1. Guttentag, M., Davidson, A., & Hume, V. (2021). Does Acceleration Work? Five Years of Evidence from the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative. ANDE, pp. 15–16.

2. Yale Insights. Design Thinking for Global Mental Health. Interview with Daisy Rosales, Impact & Innovation podcast.

3. Rwanda Biomedical Centre. (2022). Rwanda Biomedical Centre Calls the Public to Utilise Mental Health Services.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elie Imani is the founder of Safari Strives, an organization supporting operating businesses in Rubavu, Rwanda