While the stigma around mental health is universal, it is more severe in countries like Pakistan, and in the Middle East, where the socio-cultural barriers make it even more challenging to address mental health concerns. Also, people suffering from mental health issues often avoid seeking treatment due to the subtle and obvious stigma, discrimination, and prejudice attached to it. In such a scenario, a highly passionate and socially aware entrepreneur, Alizeh Valjee, the COO and Co-Founder of Saaya Health, is breaking all barriers to spread awareness related to mental health and provide accessible mental health services to those in need. This article presents a detailed insight into Alizeh Valjee’s inspiring entrepreneurial journey.
Belonging to a privileged background, Valjee received her early education from one of the most prestigious educational institutes in Pakistan, the Karachi Grammar School. Since a child, Valjee has been highly intrigued by human behaviours. Her personal life experiences and challenges in family life made her even more passionate about studying human behaviours. Her clarity about what she wanted from her life helped her decide her future educational plans at a young age. She finally went to Mount Holyoke College, a private Liberal Arts college in Massachusetts, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Psychology.
During her college, she would return home and explore internship opportunities. She started her journey as a counsellor by working at a rehabilitation centre in Karachi, where she worked for people with mental health issues. As a child, Valjee was highly inspired by her father, a philanthropist who had inculcated a strong sense of giving back to society in her. Therefore, she never even considered staying in the US and decided to dedicate the prime years of her life to serving people from her part of the world.
Her efforts to take her counselling journey to the next level began while she was still an intern. During her internship, her supervisor asked her to design a presentation to educate the family members about the patients suffering from mental health issues. That is when Valjee realised how a general lack of awareness and understanding of mental health issues creates a gap between patients and society. People usually do not relate to how mental health patient feels and why they feel that way. As a result, they fail to develop and demonstrate empathy toward them and look down upon them. After identifying the gap in the lack of knowledge about mental health issues among the masses, Valjee decided to continue working for this cause.
She worked at the rehab department of different psychiatric facilities, which essentially takes patients with severe mental health conditions and makes them fit enough to function in society. She realised that even after recovering from their illnesses, individuals who had suffered from mental health issues had to deal with the stigma attached to them. They fail to get employment opportunities even when they fully recover and never get a chance to become a normal part of mainstream society. Consequently, they start relapsing, which adds to their challenges.
During the same time, Valjee’s high school friend, who was pursuing her PhD from Cambridge University and was working with some startups, approached her. She discussed with Valjee her passion for starting an initiative that could help solve a problem in Pakistan. Valjee discussed her experience of working with patients at rehab facilities. Valjee and her friend decided to help people who have recovered from mental health conditions to reintegrate into society.
To meet this end, they founded an NGO known as Care for Health, which tried to approach companies and businesses that can provide employment opportunities to individuals who have recovered from mental illnesses. According to Valjee, it was a long and very challenging journey to convince people to employ such individuals due to the stigma and lack of acceptance in society. However, Valjee did not give up and worked for Care for Health NGO for about a decade. She simultaneously co-founded another mental health organisation ‘Taskeen.’ Taskeen worked to prevent people from developing mental health issues. Their main focus was providing awareness about managing stress, well-being, relationships, harnessing spirituality, and other methods that can prevent individuals from developing mental health issues.
While Valjee was working in the field, a couple of stakeholders approached her and discussed the need to integrate mental health services with technology. During the same time, Valjee’s business partner, Sarmad Ahmad, who had developed a passion for working for mental well-being after he saw people close to him deeply suffer from the same, decided to exit his corporate career. He collaborated with Valjee to initiate a mental health and tech company called ‘Saaya Health.’
In 2018, Valjee and her partners conducted a B2C pilot, by outsourcing some technology from India and started an online counselling platform. They didn’t advertise their initiative. Still, South Asians from around the world started signing up organically for their counselling services because they were more comfortable connecting with Pakistani therapists or therapists relating to the South Asian context. So with zero budget spent on a marketing plan, Saaya Health organisation started getting revenue. After this small pilot, they decided to develop their own in-house online counselling platform. This was done under the leadership of Saaya’s third co-founder, Syed Naseh, who runs a Swedish-Pakistani software house known as ‘Diya Interactive’. Side by side, they started working on the B2B route in 2019.
Based on his experience, Sarmad Ahmed proposed the idea of initiating B2B services as he was aware that B2B requires less marketing spending and is an efficient way to expand a startup, especially during the initial phase. During these initial years, the three founders had ‘bootstrapped’ and were investing their own resources into achieving Saaya’s mission of increasing access to quality mental health care. In 2019, their first client, IBA, signed on, and the Saaya Health team started serving their student body.
For the next year, their team coordinated with multiple companies and startups willing to sign up for counselling services for their employees. For example, a garment factory was interested in getting mental health services for their factory workers. But no one was ready to take the first step. Then, COVID-19 happened, after which the need for mental health counselling skyrocketed. Many businesses started to mandate the need for counselling for their employees. Different companies, such as Engro Corporation, HBL, Bayer Pharma, and other businesses, signed up for Saaya Health services. In the second year, companies such as Siemens, Procter & Gamble, Food Panda, etc., signed up to avail Saaya Health’s counselling services for their employees. The Saaya Health team also collaborated with Bay View Academy Clifton, a high school to promote mental health awareness. With time, Saaya Health started catering to many corporates, multinationals, startups, and some non-profit organisations, such as Orange Tree Foundation.
The team usually begins with awareness about mental health and highlights the importance of maintaining well-being. In these sessions, the team specifically focus on having a dialogue with the employees about mental health in a language that is easy for them to relate to. They also try to make employees comfortable enough to talk about things they deal with in their daily lives, so they can help them identify their stressors and guide them to cope with them. They also discuss mental health issues requiring serious attention and timely treatments. They help these employees find out if they need help and how to sign up for counselling services with Saaya Health in case they do. Moreover, they also collaborate with businesses to discuss with them other interventions they can take to ensure the mental well-being of their employees.
During COVID-19, the team was conducting online awareness sessions with companies, which were highly interactive. Simultaneously, a percentage of employees signed up for online one-to-one counselling sessions. As the pandemic has ended, the Saaya Health team is doing more on-site awareness sessions with various companies. They specifically provide online and in-person individual counselling sessions for issues such as family problems, workplace issues, and challenges, confidence and low self-esteem issues, relationship issues, and some major mental health issues. Their company caters to the full range of mental health needs. In cases where a severe psychiatric issue emerges, Saaya’s counsellors facilitate the employee to get treatment services at local facilities.
Saaya Health is also working with teenagers at Bay View Academy. This project remains specifically close to Valjee as it has given her a chance to help teenagers overcome their traumas. She believes teenagers experience multiple challenges during their formative years and helping them overcome those challenges can help her bring a positive change in their lives. Apart from counselling students, the team also coordinates with parents and teachers. They especially train teachers to develop the expertise to deal with students suffering from stress or trauma. Trained teachers can help children overcome their stressors and engage them in the class to enhance their learning experiences.
Saaya Health has been constantly expanding and impacting lives positively by working for the well-being of society. The organisation currently has a team of thirty counsellors in Pakistan and twenty counsellors working for them internationally. In 2020, they relaunched B2C for international clients only, where people from abroad can sign up and avail themselves of their counselling services by booking an online appointment. In 2021, they opened this B2C online counselling service for Pakistani clients, where any individual can sign up for their services without affiliation with a particular company or educational institution.
Valjee’s Challenges as a Female Entrepreneur
When talking about her challenges, Valjee began by highlighting her arduous journey of raising funds for her NGO. Constantly having to use her personal network to generate funds and allocating three months out of the year every year to fundraising was a huge challenge, and yet it meant that the NGO could only maintain its operations rather than grow.
When Valjee and her co-founders started Saaya Health they intended for it to be a for-profit model, where people could pay for their services so the organisation could maintain a high standard of quality of services, and invest profits back into the business, thereby catering to more and more people. Valjee witnessed the high impact and exponential growth at Saaya Health.
However, Valjee was never raised with a profit-making mindset and intended to be a social worker from a young age. She feels there is not enough focus or guidance around entrepreneurship for women, rather there is a “stigma” around profit. Therefore, she had to accept this shift in mindset and teach herself a whole new lens of decision-making, one where growth and sustainability were as important as the immediate needs of the people she was serving. She had to learn to balance empathy with logic.
The Way Forward
Saaya Health is currently providing services in the Middle East as well. They are collaborating with companies across the Middle East, where they provide mental health counselling services to 100,000 immigrant workers by serving them in seven languages. Each organisation they partner with has its online counselling platform and its panel of counsellors. Saaya Health team coordinates with them and helps them develop workshops and training programs that could cater to their employees’ specific mental health needs. During Covid, Saaya Health also offered support groups for grief and specialised interventions to different organisations.
At the beginning of 2022, Saaya Health initiated a 24/7 mental health helpline for those who do not have smartphones and cannot afford online or traditional face-to-face counselling services. Initially, a company in Pakistan asked them to develop this service for their employees. Simultaneously, a Saudi Arabian client asked them to develop the same mental health helpline services for their employees in seven languages. So currently, Saaya Health offers helpline services to local and international clients in seven languages. To provide quality mental health counselling services to their clients in the Middle East and South Asia, the team is working on policies specific to the Middle Eastern or South Asian context, as culture plays a massive role in dealing with mental health issues. By working for international clients, Valjee believes that she has been able to generate some valuable data and enhance her learning experiences as a Professional Counselor.
Currently, Saaya Health is providing counselling services to 127,000 individuals. Their major future plan includes expanding their services and making mental health services accessible for as many individuals as possible. To promote access to mental health counselling services, Valjee wishes to collaborate with the government and related bodies that can offer the resources so they could use those resources to replicate their training programs and services for the masses.
While giving a piece of advice to aspiring female entrepreneurs, Valjee shares her personal experience, that it is perfectly alright to ask for help and rely on other people. She advises aspiring female entrepreneurs to connect with others and their communities and develop a network that can help them in their journey as entrepreneurs. She is also an advocate of a co-founder model for startups and promotes the idea of sharing resources and supporting each other. She also believes in sharing ideas and collaborating for the greater good of humanity.
