Two free certifications. One business owner who needs what you already know.
For experienced professionals and business owners. One certification covers using artificial intelligence in advisory work. The other covers guiding a small business through cutting its costs and finding funding for it. Free, self-paced, and written for people with no background in either subject.
One to two hours a month, at your own pace. Stop whenever you want.
Micromentor has run free mentoring since 2008
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More than 75,000 mentoring connections worldwide
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These two trainings were built for this region with support from Google.org
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Micromentor has run free mentoring since 2008 • More than 75,000 mentoring connections worldwide • These two trainings were built for this region with support from Google.org •
Most people who would be good at this never start, for the wrong reason.
They assume mentoring means having an answer for everything, an evening a week for the next two years, and a title that says advisor. None of that is true, and the belief costs a lot of business owners the help they were about to get.
What people assume it takes
Expertise in everything the business does
A qualification in coaching or advising
An open-ended commitment with no way out
Knowing what to say for a whole hour
What it actually takes
Five years doing one thing well, in your own business or in someone else's
Nothing. The training is the preparation, and it is free
A bounded amount of time, and you can stop whenever you want
A prepared set of questions, and a method for the session
The evidence on this is quite blunt. How confident a mentor feels barely predicts anything about how useful the mentee found the relationship. What predicts it is listening well, and having actually done the work. If you have spent years doing something a small business owner is currently guessing at, the training handles the rest.
You do not have to have run a business. Micromentor asks for five years in business ownership or in a relevant field, which includes marketing, finance, operations, leadership and building a startup. A marketing manager who knows how to bring customers in is exactly as useful here as a former owner, and often more useful, because that is usually the specific thing the owner is stuck on.
“Even as a mentor myself, I use AI to guide me like a mentor. It gave me my confidence back.”
Norhan Ahmed, coach and mentor, Egypt
Two certifications in things most professionals have never been formally trained in
Not a course certificate to file away. Two subjects businesses are actively looking for help with, and that almost nobody in the region has documented training in.
Micromentor Certificate in Mentoring with AI
Using these tools properly in advisory work: preparing for a conversation in minutes, tracking someone's progress over months, and knowing where the technology should not be trusted.
Almost no professional has formal training in this yet. That is the point.
Micromentor Certificate in Climate Resilience Mentoring
Finding where a business loses money to heat, power, water and waste, and taking an owner from an idea to a funded application, including how funders actually assess one.
Green finance advising is a growing service line across the region.
Both are earned by completing the training and passing the checks inside it, and both come out of a programme supported by Google.org. The second training also points you toward the recognised international certifications in sustainable buildings and operations if you want to go further. You keep both whether or not the mentoring continues.
You are not being asked to give advice. You are being handed a method.
This is the difference between a pleasant conversation and a business that changes.
Step 1
Before the session
Reading someone's business quickly and arriving with three questions worth asking instead of starting cold. Minutes, not an evening.
Step 2
During and after
What to do with the hour. Notes without writing them, a follow-up that gets acted on, and progress you can see across months.
Step 3
The part nobody teaches
Walking an owner from “I think I need money” to a real application: what funders ask for, the warning signs, and which kind of money suits which problem.
That third one is the strongest thing in either training. Most small businesses that need funding for this work never get it, and rarely because they do not qualify. It is missing paperwork, a weak case, the wrong funder. Roughly eight in ten of the documents any funder wants are the same ones, so building that set once makes someone ready for almost anything.
It also makes your own hour go further. The training walks through how one mentor moved from one-to-one sessions to a monthly group and cut a week of preparation down to half a day.
Why we are asking you specifically
Business owners across the region kept telling us the same thing. I am working harder than I ever have, and there is nobody to check my decisions against.
Not nobody who cares. Nobody who has done it. They ask family, who are kind and wrong. They ask other owners in the same market, who are competitors. They read advice online that does not know what they sell. Then they make the call alone, at night, and hope.
Meanwhile the person who could have answered that question in four minutes exists, and is reading something like this page, and has decided they are not qualified. Or has already signed up somewhere, meant to send a first message, and never did.
That gap is almost entirely a problem of method. People who would be excellent at this hesitate because they do not know what happens in the hour, how long they are signing up for, or whether anything will come of it. All three are fixable.
So we built two trainings for the people doing the mentoring, not only for the businesses. Both start from the assumption that you are not an expert in either subject. You are not expected to be. That is what the training is for.
What you bring is the thing a module cannot teach: you have actually done the work. Priced something wrong and fixed it. Run a campaign that failed and one that landed. Chased an invoice, hired badly, rebuilt a supplier list, sat in the meeting where the numbers did not add up. Whether that was in your own business or in somebody else's, it is the thing the owner is currently trying to guess at. Not qualifications. Not confidence. Having done it.
Mentors and founders in the region, in their own words
Real people who took part in building these trainings. None of them are actors.
“I use AI to prepare for coaching sessions. It helps me structure the question I want to ask and reflect on the mindset I want to bring.”
Margreet Magdy, Founder, You Ar Initiative for Women
“Even as a mentor myself, I use AI to guide me like a mentor. It gave me my confidence back.”
Norhan Ahmed, coach and mentor, Egypt
“AI has been playing my co-founder role. It helped me a lot strategically as a solo female founder in tech and investment, both male-dominated spaces.”
Shay Gaafar, Founder and CEO, TwentyToo, UAE. The kind of founder you would be matched with.
What you get when you register
One free account opens both trainings. Either order, any speed, on a phone. You can take the business owners' versions too, and most mentors do.
Training one
Mentoring with artificial intelligence
Preparing for a session in minutes, notes that write themselves, follow-ups that get acted on, and progress you can see across months. Plus supporting several people without your calendar disappearing.
Training two
Guiding a business through cost and funding
Finding where a business loses money to heat, power, water and waste, which fixes to recommend first, and how to take someone from an idea to a funded application. Includes the real funding programmes in five countries.
Comes with both
Someone to use it with
A business owner who needs what you know, matched on what you have actually done rather than a job title. You are never handed a stranger and left to it. The trainings give you the structure for the first session and every one after.
How it actually starts
The hardest part of mentoring is not the advice. It is the first message. So both trainings are built to get you there with something already prepared.
You register. About two minutes. Both trainings open straight away, so nothing is waiting on us before you can start.
You fill in your profile: your background, what you are strong at, and the kind of business you would like to help. This is what business owners read when they are looking for someone.
Business owners get in touch with you. You choose who to reply to, how many people to take on, and when. You can also message an owner yourself if their problem is clearly one you have solved before.
You read their business in a few minutes using the method from the first training, and reply with three questions worth asking instead of a blank page. The training gives you the template, so this is a five-minute job rather than an evening of drafting.
A short call. Mostly listening. The checklist tells you what to listen for, and the follow-up writes itself afterwards.
That is the whole thing. Most people who mean to mentor never get past step four, and it is almost never because they are too busy. It is a message sitting unanswered because they do not know how to begin. That is the specific problem these trainings solve.
What it costs
Free
To you, and to the business owner.
Two Micromentor certificates, one for each training
Both trainings, start to finish
A first-message template, session checklists and question sets
The funding playbook and country toolkits
Matched with a business owner who needs your experience
Everything you download is yours to keep
About two minutes. An email and a password.
Production note: every button on the page points here. Swap the anchor for the real mentor registration URL
What this is not
The reason good people say no to this is usually a fear about what they are signing up for. So here it is, plainly.
Not open-ended. One to two hours a month, you set your own pace, and you can step away at any point without explaining why.
Not a request for money. Nobody will ask you to fund anyone, and mentors are asked not to lend to or sell to the people they mentor. If someone asks you for money, you tell us and we handle it.
Not a sign-up that goes nowhere. Both trainings open the moment you register, so nothing waits on us, and you will not be left staring at a blank message when someone does get in touch.
Not a performance. You are not expected to have answers ready. Asking good questions is most of the job, and the training gives you the questions.
Not a mailing list. Your details are used to run your account and make a match. Nothing else.
The full outline, if you want it
Most people register without reading this part.
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Getting ready for someone
Reading a business owner's profile and pulling out the three things worth asking about
Preparing a first session properly in a few minutes instead of an evening
A ready-made session prep checklist you can reuse every time
Running the relationship
Notes and summaries without writing them yourself
Follow-up messages that get acted on rather than filed
Tracking what has changed over months, including the shifts the person cannot see in themselves
Keeping several relationships going without losing track of who said what
Helping with the work itself
Being useful on the things owners get stuck on: pricing, a pitch, a product description, a plan
Ready-made requests you can adapt, and a library of your own to build up
Where not to trust the technology: tone, cultural nuance, Arabic, and anything sensitive
Going further
Moving from one person to a small group without more hours
Using the same tools your mentee is learning, so you both speak the same language
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Reading the business
The four pressures hitting businesses in this region hardest: extreme heat, water shortages, sudden flooding and rising seas along the coast
How to judge which ones a particular business is actually exposed to, using local data and hazard maps
Assessing what someone has the capacity to take on before recommending anything
Coaching the fix
Helping an owner find where money is leaking, and ordering the fixes cheapest first
Sector-specific guidance for food and farming, small manufacturing, shops and hospitality
The technical detail the business owner's version does not cover: cooling and refrigeration choices, comfortable temperature standards, keeping conditioned air inside, and designing a space so it needs less energy in the first place
Reducing waste and rethinking supply chains, including choosing better suppliers and reusing what currently gets thrown out
Helping a business keep trading when weather stops its suppliers or deliveries
Measuring and proving the savings afterwards, which is what funders and customers ask for
The specific barriers women-owned businesses run into here, with a first-session diagnostic and six tactics that work
The funding playbook
A five-part method: check readiness, get the documents in order, match the right kind of money, prepare the ask, then report on results
A scored readiness check you can run in about twenty minutes, and the warning signs to catch early
Why roughly eight in ten of the documents any funder wants are the same, and how to build that set once
A five-filter method for narrowing hundreds of funding options down to three or four in half an hour
Working out whether a change actually pays back, including when the return is a loss avoided rather than income gained
A ten-slide template for the ask, and a bank of the questions funders will put to your mentee so you can rehearse them
Country toolkits naming the real banks, portals, guarantee schemes and programmes for Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar
Questions people ask before registering
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Micromentor asks mentors to be willing to give one to two hours a month, and you set your own pace and availability. Across the platform the average works out at around eight hours a year, so in practice most mentors give less than the ask rather than more. There is no fixed term, no minimum number of people, and no notice period. You choose who to reply to, how many to take on, and when. If you need to pause for a month, you pause. If you want to stop altogether, you stop, and nobody asks you to justify it.
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You complete two trainings and receive a certificate for each: the Micromentor Certificate in Mentoring with AI, and the Micromentor Certificate in Climate Resilience Mentoring. Both come out of a programme built with support from Google.org. Whether it is worth anything depends on what you do. For a consultant or coach it is a documented service line. For someone employed it is evidence of skills-based volunteering. For anyone it is formal training in two subjects very few professionals in the region have yet. The second training also points you toward the recognised international certifications in sustainable buildings and operations if you want to take it further, though those are awarded by other bodies and not by Micromentor. You keep both certificates whether or not the mentoring continues.
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This is the most common way mentoring quietly does not happen, and it is worth naming. It is almost never about time. It is opening a blank message to a stranger and not knowing how to begin without sounding either presumptuous or useless. Both trainings are built around that moment: you get a first-message template, a way to read someone's business in a few minutes, and three questions worth opening with. You are not expected to invent the conversation.
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Almost everyone who ends up being good at this thought that first. Here is the honest position: you are not expected to have an answer for everything, and the research on mentoring is clear that how confident a mentor feels predicts very little about how useful the mentee found it. What matters is listening properly and having done the work yourself. You do not need to have owned a business. Micromentor asks for five years in business ownership or in a relevant field, which includes marketing, finance, operations, leadership and building a startup, plus being comfortable with email and video calls. That is the whole bar. The trainings supply the structure, the questions and the technical detail. You supply the years you have already spent doing one thing properly.
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You will not be working that out on your own. The first training gives you a session prep checklist, a way to read someone's business quickly, and the three questions worth opening with. The second gives you a scored readiness check and a step-by-step method for the funding conversation. Most first sessions are mostly listening, and the training tells you what to listen for.
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No, and both trainings assume it. They are written for people starting from nothing on both subjects, and they are also the reason to register: you are getting the training first, then applying it. Mentors are encouraged to read the business owners' versions too, which is the fastest way to understand what your mentee has just been taught.
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That is a fair worry and a common experience with volunteering generally, so here is how it actually works. Micromentor is not a queue you wait in. Both trainings open the moment you register, so you can finish the first one this week without anyone contacting you. Business owners then find you by browsing profiles, which is why filling yours in properly matters more than anything else you do on the platform: it is the thing they read. And you do not have to wait to be found. If you see an owner whose problem is clearly one you have solved, you can message them first.
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They should not, and mentors are asked not to lend money to or sell services to the people they mentor. Mentoring here is advice and time, nothing else. If someone does ask, you do not have to handle it yourself: report it and Micromentor deals with it.
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No to both. Micromentor is a global platform and mentors join from anywhere, with no location or language requirement. These two trainings are available in English and in Arabic, so you can take them in whichever you prefer. On language in practice: business owners choose you from your profile, so they have usually settled that question before they send the first message. If you speak Arabic, say so in your profile, because it will bring you more of the people this programme is trying to reach.
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Two trainings you would otherwise pay for, a certificate for each, a method you can use in your own work, and the specific pleasure of watching someone act on something you told them. Mentors also consistently report learning from the businesses they help, which is usually the part they did not expect. Micromentor runs mentor gatherings and a LinkedIn community if you want the peer side of it. Your details are used to run your account and let business owners find you, and they are not sold or passed to advertisers. You can close your account whenever you want. The full privacy policy is here.
Somebody is about to make a decision you already know the answer to
They will make it tonight, alone, without you. Two free certifications, a match, and one first message is all that stands between those two outcomes.
Free. Two minutes to sign up. One to two hours a month after that, at your own pace.