Liz Kakooza’s MindLab is reimagining wellbeing

Liz Nabakooza Kakooza does not believe Africa’s answers are elsewhere. She is quite clear about this. The solutions to the continent’s most pressing challenges, she holds, already exist within its communities. What is needed is not importation but excavation: the policy frameworks, the institutions, and the bold leadership required to bring those solutions to the surface and make them work at scale.

That conviction runs through everything she has built. And the terrain on which she has chosen to build is among the most neglected in African development: mental health and wellbeing.

A Continent Under Pressure

Mental health is rapidly becoming one of Africa’s most urgent and least adequately addressed development challenges. According to the World Health Organization, more than one billion people globally are living with mental health disorders, with anxiety and depression now among the leading causes of long-term disability worldwide. The economic and social costs are immense, affecting productivity, healthcare systems, relationships, and the overall wellbeing of communities.

In Africa, the challenge is particularly acute. Nearly half of African countries either lack standalone mental health policies or struggle to implement them effectively. The continent has an average of 1.4 mental health workers per 100,000 people, compared to a global average of 9.0, contributing to enormous treatment gaps across the region. Between 2000 and 2015, Africa’s population grew by 49 per cent, yet years lost to disability due to mental and substance use disorders increased by 52 per cent, a signal of a crisis growing faster than the systems designed to respond to it, as documented in The Lancet Global Health.

Uganda reflects many of these pressures. Mental health services remain underfunded and overstretched despite rising levels of psychological distress, particularly among young people, women, and vulnerable communities. As The PanAfrican Medical Journal has noted, experts estimate that untreated depression alone costs Uganda hundreds of millions of dollars annually in lost productivity. Yet innovative local approaches, ranging from mobile psychotherapy to community-based interventions, continue to demonstrate that meaningful reform is both possible and cost-effective.

Across the continent, a growing generation of leaders is beginning to challenge how wellbeing is understood and addressed. In Kenya, organisations such as BasicNeeds Kenya have worked to integrate mental health into community development and livelihoods programming. In Nigeria, digital platforms such as the Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative have focused on youth mental health advocacy and public awareness. In South Africa, workplace wellbeing and trauma-informed leadership conversations are increasingly shaping corporate and social sector spaces. Together, these efforts signal a broader continental shift: one rooted not in imported frameworks, but in African realities, lived experience, and community-centred responses.

It is within this broader movement that the work of Liz Nabakooza Kakooza stands out.

Two Institutions, One Vision

Liz is the Founder of MindLab, a non-profit and Global Health Lab reimagining wellbeing as a development imperative for Africa. MindLab builds community-led platforms for women and youth that are, by deliberate design, accessible, tangible, and free. The emphasis on free is not incidental. It reflects a view that wellbeing support which costs money to access is wellbeing support that excludes the people who need it most.

She is also the Founder and Principal of Pearl Advisory, a boutique strategic advisory practice supporting organisations and leaders across Africa and beyond in translating influence into lasting impact. The two institutions are complementary expressions of the same underlying argument: that the work of building a healthier, more equitable Africa requires both community-level infrastructure and strong, strategically capable leadership at the top.

Wellbeing as a Justice Issue

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Liz led workplace wellbeing interventions that reached over 25,000 employees across Africa, designing programmes under conditions that demanded both rigour and real-time adaptation. The scale of that work reflects not just logistical capability but a clarity of purpose that held steady under pressure.

" “LéO Africa believed in my potential even before I did. Over the past ten years, it has been more than a leadership accelerator, it has become a place to return to, to find the thread again when the work gets hard. The community we have built together has long outgrown the seminar room, and that is its greatest achievement. What I carry forward most is something Roosevelt named better than I ever could: the willingness of the man in the arena to get back up, bloodied, uncertain, but still in it. That quality is what this season demands of me, and LéO Africa is part of why I have it.” — Liz Kakooza, Distinguished Fellow

Her position on workplace wellbeing is direct: it is not a wellness benefit. It is a business imperative, a leadership responsibility, and a justice issue. That framing matters. When wellbeing is positioned as a perk, it is the first thing cut when budgets tighten. When it is understood as a structural condition for performance and dignity, it becomes non-negotiable. Liz is making that argument, and backing it with evidence drawn from over a decade of work spanning public policy, youth governance, health leadership, and social innovation.

Her arguments have found an audience beyond Uganda. In a 2019 World Economic Forum essay on Uganda’s mental health crisis, she challenged the stigma that keeps countless Ugandans from seeking help, and in a 2022 feature at the Davos Annual Meeting, she was among a cohort of young global leaders identified as working to bridge societal divides. More recently, her commentary on mental ill-health as a new pandemic in the Daily Monitor deepened the public conversation in Uganda, arguing that the treatment gap in African mental health is not merely a healthcare failure but a governance one.

Recognised, Grounded, Still Building

Liz is an Expert Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council, a Mandela Washington Fellow, and a Global Shapers alumna. She has been recognised among Uganda’s Top 40 Under 40 and Top 30 Under 30. These recognitions matter, but what is more striking is that they have not shifted the orientation of her work. She remains, as she has always been, focused on the communities her institutions are designed to serve.

Her approach is, in her own word, unapologetically African. Not as a slogan, but as a methodological commitment: to root her solutions in the realities, the knowledge, and the agency of African communities rather than in frameworks imported from elsewhere and fitted awkwardly to a different context.

Ten Years and a Thread

Liz has been part of the LéO Africa Institute community for a decade. What she describes is not a programme she completed and moved on from, but a community she keeps returning to, particularly when the work gets hard.

“LéO Africa believed in my potential even before I did. Over the past ten years, it has been more than a leadership accelerator, it has become a place to return to, to find the thread again when the work gets hard. The community we have built together has long outgrown the seminar room, and that is its greatest achievement. What I carry forward most is something Roosevelt named better than I ever could: the willingness of the man in the arena to get back up, bloodied, uncertain, but still in it. That quality is what this season demands of me, and LéO Africa is part of why I have it.”

The Roosevelt reference is to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech, the one that gave us the image of the man in the arena, face marred by dust and sweat and blood, striving valiantly. Liz is invoking it not as an abstraction but as a personal description of what leadership in her field actually asks of her. The arena is real. The getting back up is real. And the community that makes that possible is real.

What the Work Demands

Liz Nabakooza Kakooza is building institutions designed to outlast her involvement in them, which is the surest sign that she is building for the right reasons. MindLab and Pearl Advisory are not platforms for a personal brand. They are attempts to solve real problems in ways that endure.

The mental health crisis on the African continent is not waiting for the world to take notice. It is already here, in the households of Kampala, in the offices of Nairobi, in the clinics of Lagos, in the lives of women and young people for whom the cost of psychological distress is measured not in clinical data but in daily survival. Liz has spent a decade building the infrastructure that those lives deserve.

She is still in it. Bloodied at times, uncertain at others, but still in it. And that, as she would say, is exactly what this season demands.

Connect with Liz on LinkedIn and follow MindLab’s work at mindlabafrica.org.