There is a woman in Lagos right now who woke up at 5am to pack orders before her children wake up. She has been running her small business for three years. She is not failing, in fact by most measures she is doing well. She has customers. She has a product people love. She works harder than almost anyone you know.
But she is stuck. Not because she lacks drive. Not because the market does not exist. She is stuck because she has never had access to someone who has already solved the problem she is staring at. She has never had a single conversation with someone who could look at her business and say “I have been here. Here is what I would do.”
That one conversation could change everything.
That conversation is what LIFT is being built to create.
What Shecluded Has Seen
Shecluded has spent years working directly with women entrepreneurs across Nigeria. We have provided funding, built community, run programs and sat with hundreds of women as they tried to grow. And the clearest thing we have learned is this: capital alone does not close the gap.
The women we work with are not short on ambition. They are short on access. Access to knowledge. Access to experience. Access to someone who has navigated what they are navigating and is willing to be honest about it.
When we ask our community what they need most, the answers are not about money. They sound like this.
“I don’t know how to price my product so I actually make profit.”
“I’ve been doing this for two years and I still don’t have proper records.”
“I know I need to grow but I don’t know what to do next.”
“I tried to get a loan and I didn’t even know what documents to bring.”
“I am doing everything in my business and I’m exhausted.”
These are not funding problems. They are knowledge and guidance problems. And they are exactly what a great mentor solves.
What LIFT Is
Leading & Inspiring Female Traders (LIFT) is Shecluded’s mentorship program, and it is built around ten focus areas that reflect the real challenges women entrepreneurs face.
Those ten areas are business model and income clarity, pricing and profitability, financial literacy and record keeping, access to finance and credit readiness, sales and market expansion, operations and systems, digital presence and visibility, compliance and formalisation, leadership and mindset, and market access and partnerships.
For each area, we are looking for ten qualified mentors. People who have lived inside these problems. People who have made the mistakes, found the solutions and built something real on the other side of it.
Each mentor will be asked to select at least three focus areas where they have genuine expertise.
What You Would Actually Be Doing
Over four structured months, you would work closely with a small group of women who have been carefully matched to your expertise. Monthly one-on-one sessions. The occasional group masterclass. And an open door after the program ends, because business challenges do not follow a schedule.
Every mentor who joins LIFT will receive a mentor kit, a two-page document that lays out exactly what is expected, how much time is involved, and how the program works.
The commitment is about three hours a month. That is roughly the length of a long lunch.
What You Get Back
We are not going to pretend that giving is entirely selfless. There is something that happens to experienced professionals when they mentor seriously. Something that is hard to describe until you experience it.
You see your own journey differently. You articulate things you have known instinctively but never had to put into words. You are reminded of why you started and what you have actually built. You encounter hunger and resilience in another person that reignites something in you.
Beyond that, every LIFT mentor will have a full profile published across Shecluded’s platforms. You will be recognised publicly as a LIFT mentor. You will be part of a network of Nigeria’s most experienced and generous business minds. You will be featured in our content, our communications and our community.
But honestly, none of that is the real thing. The real thing is simpler. At the end of four months, you will have had a hand in changing someone’s trajectory. You will have shortened someone’s painful learning curve. You will have given someone permission to think bigger.
That is not a small thing.
Are You One of Them?
If you have built a business, led an organisation, navigated the Nigerian market, worked in finance or operations or marketing or law or technology (and if you have done it long enough to have made real mistakes and learned real lessons) then this program was built with you in mind.
We are not looking for perfection. We are looking for honesty, experience and a genuine desire to invest in someone else’s growth.
Applications to join the LIFT mentor cohort is now open. If you are interested, fill out this form to register your interest.
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See you on the inside!
