Reducing Business Failure Through Mentorship for First-Time Afghan Entrepreneurs

Opening a business involves decisions that are easy to underestimate. An owner must choose a location, calculate prices, find suppliers, attract customers, and manage money that may also be needed at home. Someone may know how to repair a phone or sew a good shirt without knowing whether the income from that skill will cover rent and other expenses. The first months can become a costly period of learning through mistakes.

For first-time Afghan entrepreneurs, access to experienced guidance could make this learning less expensive. A mentor can help an owner question assumptions, examine records, and consider choices before committing limited savings. This support cannot remove weak demand, unreliable services, or barriers to finance. It can, however, help people respond more thoughtfully to the conditions they face.

Mentorship should therefore be treated as a practical business service. Its purpose is to improve the owner’s ability to make decisions independently. A useful mentor asks careful questions, shares relevant experience, and follows up on agreed actions. Encouragement has a place, but it needs to be connected to the everyday work of running a business.

Before the First Customer Arrives

Consider a hypothetical young entrepreneur planning to open a clothing shop. Relatives praise the idea, and a landlord offers a suitable space. The owner may feel pressure to rent quickly before someone else takes it. Yet several questions remain unanswered: Who will buy the clothes? What prices can customers afford? How many sales are needed to cover monthly costs?

A mentor could help investigate these questions before the lease is signed. The entrepreneur might speak with potential customers, observe nearby shops, and compare supplier prices. A small trial through advance orders could provide useful information without requiring a full shop immediately.

This process would not produce certainty. Customers may change their minds, and conditions may shift. Still, evidence from a small test is more useful than relying entirely on enthusiasm. The mentor’s contribution would be to help the owner identify what needs checking and choose an affordable way to check it.

Sometimes the best outcome would be a smaller launch or a delayed opening. A mentoring program should allow that conclusion. If its success is measured only by the number of businesses opened, advisers may feel pressure to encourage ventures that are poorly prepared.

Starting carefully can protect household resources. An entrepreneur who avoids an unsuitable investment may preserve the chance to pursue a better opportunity later.

What a Mentor Adds to Training

Business courses can introduce useful skills, but applying them to a real enterprise may require further help. A lesson on pricing is different from deciding what to charge when a supplier raises costs and customers resist an increase.

The International Labour Organization’s Start and Improve Your Business program addresses stages from business creation to growth. Its materials include areas such as costing, stock control, record keeping, and planning. These provide a foundation that mentorship could help owners apply to their own situations.

For example, an owner may understand that profit means income after expenses but continue overlooking transport or packaging. A mentor could review one actual order and work through every cost. The owner could then repeat the calculation independently for the next order.

Regular contact also creates opportunities to notice problems early. An entrepreneur may mention that customers are buying frequently but paying late. This could lead to a discussion about credit terms before unpaid balances become difficult to manage.

Mentorship need not involve long meetings. A short discussion focused on one decision may be more useful than a broad presentation. Each meeting could end with a manageable task, such as checking a supplier quotation, recording a week’s expenses, or asking customers about a product.

At the next meeting, the mentor and owner could examine what happened. Over time, this routine would connect advice with evidence.

Choosing the Right Person to Give Advice

Experience alone does not guarantee good mentoring. A successful business owner may have benefited from circumstances that a newcomer cannot reproduce. Advice that worked for a large company may be unsuitable for a small workshop with little cash.

Matching should therefore consider the type and size of the business, the owner’s goals, language, and location. A mentor familiar with local customers and suppliers may identify practical issues that a distant adviser misses.

Mentors also need to listen. An entrepreneur should be able to explain a decision without being dismissed for lacking experience. Questions should help clarify the problem rather than become a way for the mentor to display authority.

Clear boundaries would protect the relationship. Mentors should disclose conflicts of interest, keep business information confidential, and avoid pressuring participants to buy from particular suppliers. Any financial relationship should be stated openly.

Programs should also provide a way to change mentors. A poor match does not necessarily mean either person has failed. The owner may need expertise the mentor cannot provide, or the relationship may not allow honest discussion.

Specialist questions require appropriate referrals. A mentor should recognize when an issue needs a qualified accountant, legal adviser, technician, or other professional. Guessing beyond one’s knowledge can create new problems.

Making Guidance Reach More Afghan Entrepreneurs

Mentorship will have limited social value if it reaches only confident applicants with strong connections. Selection procedures should welcome people who have useful skills but little experience completing formal applications.

A short interview or practical description of the proposed business could be more suitable than requiring a polished presentation. Support should be available in Dari or Pashto as needed. Applicants should understand the selection criteria and the services they will receive.

Location and timing matter too. Rural owners may find repeated travel expensive. People running a shop throughout the day may be unable to attend meetings during busy hours. A combination of local visits, phone calls, and occasional group sessions could make participation more realistic.

Online mentoring may connect Afghan entrepreneurs with experienced people elsewhere, including members of the diaspora. However, remote advisers would need a clear understanding of local conditions. Their advice should be checked against actual prices, infrastructure, and customer demand.

Women entrepreneurs may need arrangements that respond to additional barriers affecting access to markets, training, and professional networks. Programs should consult women about suitable meeting formats and protect their privacy. Mentorship cannot replace the wider changes needed for equal participation, but its design should avoid creating further exclusion.

Peer groups could provide another source of learning. Owners facing similar problems might compare experiences and share practical ideas. These discussions should be organized carefully so that participants are not expected to reveal sensitive information to direct competitors.

Learning from Existing Support Without Assuming Success

Business mentoring is already part of some support efforts in Afghanistan. A World Bank Group fact sheet describes the Darya Incubation and Acceleration Program, launched in February 2024, as providing training, coaching, mentorship, and other business development services.

This example shows that mentorship can be included within a broader support structure. It does not, by itself, prove that mentoring reduces business failure. Evaluators would need to examine outcomes and distinguish the effect of guidance from other assistance participants receive.

That distinction matters when programs combine mentoring with grants, equipment, or access to finance. A business may improve because several forms of support work together. Claiming that mentorship alone caused the improvement would go beyond the available evidence.

Afghan programs could build on existing experience while testing which services owners find useful. Feedback should include difficult cases and businesses that close, rather than focusing only on selected success stories.

When Staying Open Is Not the Best Decision

Reducing business failure should not mean keeping every enterprise operating at any cost. An owner may continue losing money because closing feels embarrassing. A mentor who offers reassurance without examining the accounts may deepen that loss.

Honest guidance should include the possibility of changing the product, reducing the scale, pausing operations, or closing responsibly. The decision should consider debts, remaining stock, obligations to workers, and household needs.

A closure can still involve useful learning. The owner may discover that demand was too limited or that the business model required more capital than expected. Recording those lessons can inform future choices.

Mentors should also avoid recommending loans as an automatic response to difficulty. Borrowing may help a viable business handle a temporary gap, but it can worsen the position of an enterprise with no realistic route to repayment.

The owner must retain control of the decision. A good mentoring relationship provides clearer information and choices without making the entrepreneur dependent on approval.

Judging Whether Mentorship Helps

Evaluation should begin with a realistic picture of each business before support starts. Programs could record sales patterns, costs, debts, record-keeping practices, and the owner’s goals.

Follow-up should examine changes over time. Useful measures might include whether owners understand their costs, retain customers, manage repayments, and earn income after expenses. Business survival matters, but survival with growing debt is not necessarily an improvement.

Where practical and ethical, evaluators could compare outcomes with those of similar eligible entrepreneurs who have not yet received support. They should account for differences between participants and nonparticipants rather than assuming every later improvement came from mentoring.

The program itself also needs a workable budget. Recruiting mentors, training them, coordinating meetings, and reviewing quality all require resources. A smaller program offering consistent guidance may serve owners better than a large scheme with little follow-up.

Conclusion

Mentorship could help first-time Afghan entrepreneurs avoid preventable mistakes by connecting experience with the decisions they face each week. Its strongest contribution would be practical: checking demand before investment, understanding costs, reviewing problems early, and recognizing when a plan needs to change.

Programs should recruit suitable mentors, protect confidentiality, and make participation accessible beyond established business networks. Results should be assessed honestly, including cases where scaling back prevents deeper losses. The goal is to help entrepreneurs make informed choices and build businesses that can support their households without placing their limited resources at unnecessary risk.

Author’s Name: Mohammad Amin Bayan

References

International Labour Organization. (n.d.). Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB).
https://www.ilo.org/start-and-improve-your-business-siyb

International Labour Organization. (n.d.). Start and improve your business: Generic trainer’s guide.
https://researchrepository.ilo.org/esploro/outputs/manual/Start-and-improve-your-business-generic/995218926002676

World Bank. (n.d.). The World Bank Group in Afghanistan—Fact sheet.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/brief/2024/09/26/world-bank-afghanistan-resilience-trust-fund-artf-support-for-the-people-of-afghanistan